Main menu

This may be the dumbest article I've read lately.

Pages

After a good, long run, we have decided to close our forums in an effort to refocus attention to other sections of the site. Fortunately for you all, we're living in a time where discussion of a favorite topic now has a lot of homes. So we encourage you all to bring your ravenous love for discussion to Chuck's official Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. And, as always, you can still post comments on all News updates. Thank you for your loyalty and passion over the years. These changes will happen June 1.

It reminds me of all the people like our very own Alexanderdeath25, the anti-intellectualists who insist that philosophy is a worthless endeavor and fail to see how instrumental philosophical debate has been in shaping the world.

But the only value Weinberg ever found in reading philosophers was when they refuted other philosophers who had clouded his mind.

He kind of demonstrates your entire point in the first paragraph, negating most of the remainder of his article.

Exactly. And what really fascinates me about his article is how, in order to show how dumb philosophers are, he takes a completely marginal philosopher, David Stove, and attacks him as if he were considered a typical representative of that strange species, "the philosopher." It's low and it's cheap.

I used to have a dim view of philosophy, when I first started college. Mostly it was due to an inept philosophy instructor. But I've come to realize it's almost like a modern form of divination, except, you know, lacking the aspect of mysticism. You have to collect these thinkers and thoughts in abstract, read them closely, then pull back to look at the bigger picture and see how everything fits together regarding any given issue.

Let me put it this way: Not everyone feels the need for philosophical rumination, but everyone is capable of asking philosophical questions. And I don't think the point of philosophy is to come up with answers; the point is, rather, to ask ourselves if the questions we are trying to answer are the ones that are worth our time.

Yes, there's a lot of horseshit out there. One of my favourite thinkers, Jacques Lacan, is simply unreadable to most people, and although that may lend an air of esoteric sophistication to his work, it in fact only makes people think that philosophy is a crock of crap. But this doesn't mean that the guy wasn't a brilliant (and weird, I'll admit) thinker.

I'm using Lacan as an example, but really, this goes for most continental philosophers as well as analytic philosophers. Sometimes an idea is just irreducibly complex; fine. But that doesn't mean the idea is necessarily SO complex that it needs to be ignored by the general public, or disregarded at once because it is "elitist". At the same time, philosophy, in my view, ought to be accessible to anyone who's interested in it. That's why, despite his flaws as a stylist, Slavoj Zizek is a perfect "public intellectual". He writes really dense, allusive, difficult texts for one public, and more accessible, digestable and concrete books for another public. He can go from being highly erudite and impenetrable to pedagogical, interesting and amusing. There's something there to please everyone.

People on these forums and in my social circle like to rag on me for being elitist. The point they're missing is that I don't WANT to look smarter than everyone else; what I want, as a philosophically-inclined guy, is to elevate the tone of discussion so that nobody feels left out and people understand what the fuck I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to keep my circle of smart friends tight; I want to expand it as much as possible, because I have seen that no matter how much people suck, they're capable of intelligent debate if they want. This article that I've linked is exactly what's wrong with the popular conception of philosophy as an elitist discipline with intellectuals hiding in their faculty corridors: it doesn't have to be that way. Philosophy - the art of asking the right questions - can be done anywhere by the layman, and if you have a special interest in it, then you shouldn't feel stigmatized by articles like this if you want to study it in college.

I like philosophy, man. I'd have been jumping in to your discussions more lately except I do need a break for the moment. I've only ever associated philosophy with theology until recently, so I'm learning how to separate the two right now.

I have a friend at work with whom I've sort of gone through this de-conversion process. We both were reading up on Buddhism for about 6-8 months and I think she feels settled there but as for me, even with the completely non-supernatural sects of Buddhism, there was always a tiny bit of unnecessary *something* to believe in.

Anyway, we've had people sit down to have lunch with us, people we both know, then walk off after ten minutes without having a thing to add to the conversation. Now, many people call us elitists, sometimes in a mean way, sometimes, not. Recently there has been a couple who are into eastern mysticism that are trying to get us to read their books on all these gurus and such.

Anyway.... all that is to say, I'm up for some good discussion. In time. Don't let the bastards get you down.

The elitist thing is bothersome, when you're trying to break into all of this. When I started out reading the dialogues, I didn't see the necessity of all these complex words. I'm sitting, struggling to grasp a concept, and it's like juggling ideas and just as I come to a point where I can feel understanding about to creep in, I lose it all because I don't understand a word, a piece of history; boy loving? What the fuck is boy loving? Like... is it... nooo. Empirical, does that mean something to do with empires?

Struggling through long paragraphs filled with complex words, references to time periods as far back as ancient, all to grasp a concept which is in itself difficult, becomes simply unbearable when you're the type of person who has trouble admitting that he doesn't know something. For those people, which I'm not at all one of, I imagine there's a calming sensation when you stumble upon the philosophers whose philosophy says: Philosophy is meaningless. Just put the book down and you'll be better than all of these people you can't understand!

I still find it annoying when I come to the end of such a paragraph and the writer decides to throw in a phrase of Latin or French that I don't understand.

Who is that writer, who has written hundreds of novels, who said that if there's a sentence or phrase in your work that you feel has some heavy charm, some beauty in itself (like Baer strove for with each sentence in his entire trilogy) then you should omit it immediately?

If all philosophers thought like that, some of these books of philosophy could be cut in half without losing anything of essence.

Nassim Nicolas Taleb, HATES elitists. So how come, in his book, The Black Swan Theory, he goes on and on to convince me that his library is more extensive than anyone else's, he tells me how many books he reads a year, the type of wines he likes, the massive piles of fan mail he receives and doesn't read? I could have cut paragraphs from each page, sentences from each paragraph, words from each sentence, and walked away with the same ideas that were book-worthy. I didn't need to know about his social circle of advocates of uncertainty, who sit around boasting about how they're superior to stock brokers who think they're elitists. His effort is almost always concentrated on mocking somebody and elevating himself, as if these great ideas he's constructed give him the right. It's like it's his birthday party, and he invited you, and the price of the cake and games is that you have to sit there being tolerant of his foul company.

You sit down for a friendly game of chess, and you end up being attacked in person by people like Bobby Fischer.

"I like the moment in a game when I can see my opponent's will break."

WHAT!? That's your motive, when I'm sitting here trying to appreciate and understand the skills you've developed? But just because there's dickheads like Bobby Fischer and Nassim Nicolas Taleb, that doesn't in any way discredit the world of philosophy, or the game of chess. Steve Sailer and Alexanderdeath25 are the people who flip the chess board when they lose and say, "This game is stupid!"

You just have to tolerate the pathos that leaks into it all. David Hume was fat, and he tells you why. Socrates justifies his heathen appearance. The writer's humanity almost always seeps into the work and it seems everyone has a way of flipping the world on its ass through a collage of ideas and, simply because the philosopher thinks he's right, there's no way he can come out of it without it looking like he thinks he's better than anyone else. My way of dealing with it is to accept it before hand. If I don't understand something, I give myself over to the belief that I'm ignorant. Just roll over on my back, let the philosopher have his way with me, and when he's sitting there feeling high and mighty on his hill of superiority, I walk away with his ideas, and he's alone with his excessive bullshit.

Ox-ee-more-on, is not pronounced like that, and in this lecture on rhetoric, this nameless Brooklyn professor tells you how it's really pronounced (ox-im-er-on, he says)and goes on in an excited geek voice to tell you how you can show off at parties by mentioning that. This man says he loves to yell out the name of a logical fallacy during a debate, Argumentum ad populum! like it's a spell that makes your opponent WRONG. If that's your victory in life, you can keep it, nameless dude. But I learned a lot from that guy without learning his name. If I wanted to be a better chess player, I'd will myself to play and lose five hundred games with Mr. Fischer while he amuses himself with thinking my will is smashed all over the floor.

See, parts of that article are really important, i think, because a lot of philosophers do seem to disregard science hat we know to be fact. It can make a conversation wholly useless if you're talking with someone who just doesn't care that his What if question is irrelevant.

I'm science minded, so maybe i'm biased on this, but science should inform philosophy, and, with a lot of the most important philosophers, it did. It's no surprise that philosophers were also mathematicians, biologists, physicists, and whathaveyou. But then there are the others who seem to just pile words on words. I think there's a place for them as well, but, when arguing with followers of these thinkers, they tend to be uncompromising. If you disagree, it's a failing of your intellect, not of the argument. There is no other side for them because they've already cashed all their chips.

For example, my roommate just finished a class on aestthetics. His professor essentially stated that Plato was the most intelligent man to ever live and was undeniably right on all accounts. I mean, where does that get you, Mr PhD? There's no room for discussion and you apparently have no faith in your own intelligence to ever think of a unique thought.

Now, that, of course, is not the typical case, but i've run into it more than seems necessary. And my school, or so i'm told, has one of the better philosophy departments in the nation. I can't speak for the accuracy of that because it's purely what someone told me, but i find a dangerous lack of intellectual curiosity there and an emptiness to these professors.

Yeah, it's all about logic and reasoning and the like, but just because something appears reasonable or logical does not make it correct. Now, i like Socrates, or Plato's version of Socrates. I think he's hilarious and very clever, but i disagree with him on every topic i've read by him. He can weave an argument and will teach you how to argue damn near any point, but it's a game to him. For example, in the Republic, he tells Tharasmychus [or some such name, can't recall and too lazy to check] that the sophists view is all wrong. His Sophists view: might is right. Basically, anyway when it comes to government. It's a very dictator leaning view. Socrates says this is all wrong, but then goes on to set up a form of oligarchic totalitarianism that, because of he way he argues, sounds completely reasonable. And, the best part, he places himself at the head of it. But, because of the logic and reasoning, you placed him there, too! It's brilliant! But, it's dangerous, and it's this kind of logical game that can make anything reasonable, even eradicating the jews or lynching the niggers or driving the Muhammadans out of the holy land.

Most philosophy that i come across is this kind of logic game or linguistic puzzle and, while some of it is quite interesting, i find it unuseful and kind of dangerous.

What's important with philosophy is that it teaches you to question and it teaches you to think in systems that you wouldn't normally think in, which is important. But i find the ignorance of the sciences troubling. I mean, i'm a brain guy, and for me to talk to a dualist can be complete nonsense because they're unwavering in belief, regardless what you show them, what you tell them. But there are even materialists who discount the progress we've made in psychology and neurology in understanding the brain and how it works and why it works.

Like, i was chatting with someone on here in chat and we were talking about this thought experiment. It was about which part of your brain is you, essentially. He said: Let's split your brain in half and put one half in a new body, then keep splitting them and splitting them till there are parts of your brain in dozens of bodies. Which body is yours?

Firstly: what if scenarios are almost completely worthless. If you can't do it, you can't do it, end of discussion. But what if we can! Well, we can't.

Secondly: The brain doesn't work like that. You can't simply rip it apart and expect it to work. You split a brain completely in half and remove that half, both bodies will likely die or be vegetative. The brain is more than just this organ in our head, it's also connected to every nerve in your body, running down your spinalcord and all that. You can remove large sections of a brain and retain similar function, but to try to take that removed part and make it a new person is nonsense. The brain is a very complex system, probably the most complex thing that exists that we know of, and it's part of a larger complex system. Your liver, yeah, split it in half, and that other half can function, to a degree, in another person. Remove the occipital lobe and you lose sight, even though that's only 20% of your brain. Remove the left half of the occipital lobe and you lose the right hemifield of sight. Take out the temporal lobe and you're losing memory, audition, etc.

Thirdly: There's not just one part of your brain that is you. You are your brain, but you are also your body. Those two things affect one another, jsut like experience changes the shape and function of your brain. There is no spot in you that is all of you. You are the culmination and synthesis of every part of you.

But this person, i really can't recall who, they were a new person and i don't think they're around anymore, didn't care to hear about these facts. I assume they read what i wrote, but they mayn't have. In any case, science did nothing to change their mind. He just kept asking me What if it were possible? If it were possible, we'd be a vastly different species who went through a vastly different evolution.

I don't think science and philosophy should ever be at odds, but there are those in the philosophical crowd that just don't give a shit about what science has to say. The empiricists were on the right track, but a lot of them are pretty useless now mostly because their science is a couple hundred years old. I mean, it's hard to finish a puzzle when you only have a few of the pieces.

I've kind of dragged on here and, like i said way back up there, i'm a science leaning person, pretty knee deep in how things work, so i'm probably biased, but i do find other systems of thought fascinating. I also tend to find them a bit useless or impractical.

I think the main fault of philosophy right now, like religion, is that they're a bit too inside themselves. Outside opinions are unwanted, but they want to have first say elsewhere. All the natural sciences were built out of philosophy, as were math and psychology. It's called the father of science for a reason, but it tries to delve into questions it's not suited for. Part of the problem, i think, is that they feel that every thought and idea is expressible in language, which i think it stupid and wrongheaded. But, more than that, and why i think people see it as elitist, is because of the way that they attempt to express their ideas. Which, at times, can be so confoundingly convoluted that, in my opinion, it's barely worth bothering with.

The best ideas should be stated simply or at least have the ability to be explicated in a simple manner. It's an idea that pervades through the sciences. Most equations that are true, that we call laws, are simple, concise, and, dare say, beautiful.

Maybe my ideas of philosophy are limited or maybe i'm just a philistine, but i find that i disagree with most philosophers i read. Even come to hate some of them. And it's the way they're put on a pedestal, as if because they said it and call themselves philosophers they're more right than you. I agree with the notion that everyone is a philosopher, or has the ability to be. If you disagree, go ahead and disagree, but at least have a reason or three.

1] I don't much like philosophy anymore.
2] Philosophy should be informed by facts.
3] Philosophy, i some ways, tries to answer questions it's not suited to answer.
4] Philosophy is useful in the proper contexts.
5] I disagree with most philosophers i've read.
6] I'm a dolt.

The article, in fact, is not at all anti-intellectual. It's simply expressing a frustration that philosophy doesn't add anything when it completly puts the blinders on with regards to reality. I took a few philosophy classes as an undergrad and this was the part that was most disturbing--the unrealistic hypothetical situations upon which conclusions would be drawn. People would argue themselves unwaveringly into absurdity all the time.

Now, philosophy not completely irrelevant. It is a manner of thinking from which modern science was born. What is frustrating is simply when philosophy fails to aknowledge scientific observation and the very reality in front of its nose.

The article, in fact, is not at all anti-intellectual. It's simply expressing a frustration that philosophy doesn't add anything when it completly puts the blinders on with regards to reality. I took a few philosophy classes as an undergrad and this was the part that was most disturbing--the unrealistic hypothetical situations upon which conclusions would be drawn. People would argue themselves unwaveringly into absurdity all the time.

Now, philosophy not completely irrelevant. It is a manner of thinking from which modern science was born. What is frustrating is simply when philosophy fails to aknowledge scientific observation and the very reality in front of its nose.

This is where the rhetoric, or just the debaters skills, become more important than actually getting anywhere in a discussion; and it's a huge turn off.

I know a guy who can prove just about anything you say wrong, an almost any level. He describes himself as eruditely pedantic (well-read, yet talks to show people how very much he has read.) He likes the sound of his own voice.

But everyone thinks he's a douche-bag and no one likes talking to him. It took us months to get him to leave us be a while back on a blog project I was a part of. He could argue anything, for or against, but his goal was never to get anywhere, only to win. He didn't want to make the world better, or understand someone else's viewpoint, or even make his own slice of the world better; he just wanted you to know that he could outthink YOU.

I want to be in a place where I understand these things better, but without losing sight of the purpose of philosophical discussion as a vehicle of change.

Argumentation is a bit of a lost art, i think. I love arguing and will argue against something i believe in as an exercise or even just because i think it's fun. You learn a lot about what you believe by continually attacking it.

Anyway, i do it a bit like Socrates, always questioning and making people be clear, but i've no answers for anything, really. I can tell you why you're probably wrong, but i will never be able to tell you what the answer is.

I think that's a bit of the failing i see in philosophy. They're often looking for answers in the unanswerable.

But the only value Weinberg ever found in reading philosophers was when they refuted other philosophers who had clouded his mind.

He kind of demonstrates your entire point in the first paragraph, negating most of the remainder of his article.

Exactly. And what really fascinates me about his article is how, in order to show how dumb philosophers are, he takes a completely marginal philosopher, David Stove, and attacks him as if he were considered a typical representative of that strange species, "the philosopher." It's low and it's cheap.

Not only low and cheap, but a perfect example of the selection bias (non-representative sample) that he attributes not only to Stove, but generally to every member of the strange species. He should cast a little wider if he wants to convince us that an ineptness for statistical reasoning is what chiefly characterizes philosophers.

I'm a fan of the British-American analytic tradition in philosophy. Numerous contemporary thinkers are carrying on in this tradition just fine. From the top of my head, let me recommend The View From Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. Nagel takes up provocative ideas in simple terms that any normal literate person can understand. For example, if you'd like a thought experiment that doesn't insult your intelligence, try Nagel's paper "What is it Like to be a Bat?"

Not only is this paper still fresh and relevant despite it's antiquity (1974) when indexed to the push of science, but it does a great job of demonstrating that the mind-body problem is not exhausted by discoveries in neurology, evolutionary biology or related physical sciences.

It remains an irreducible fact of consciousness that there is "something it is like to be a bat." The phenomenology of that experience is utterly inaccessible to us. It is something we get no nearer to by reductive, objective explanations of echolocation in mammals and the firing of bat neurons. The best our theories and accumulations of scientific fact could possibly do for us at the current moment is inform our imaginations. But we'd still be speculating wildly as we try to imagine what it is like to be a bat.

Less obvious, but crucial, is the recognition of otherness in people. I don't know if Nagel would go with me here, but I'll say this: You can accumulate biographical facts pertaining to a person with obsessiveness and precision and a push to be exhaustive, and you'll never know exactly what it is like to be that person. But it will likely be less of a radical challenge than imagining the subjective experience of another species.

Why is any of this relevant to the persistence and salience of the mind-body problem? Because it remains an objective fact of the universe that there are classes of subjective experience that can't be accounted for in objective scientific narrative or language. And this is enough to warrant that any hasty "scientism" of reductive metaphor that reduces consciousness to the biological mechanisms that likely underpin it, is a narrative of science insufficient for a robust understanding of the topic under consideration, still less a complete account. What's more, the narrative of the physical sciences rests on a set of tools and assumptions that are excellent for acquiring certain kinds of knowledge, but wholly inadequate for other classes of knowledge. Again, I'm not sure if Nagel would go with me there, entirely, but I'm giving you my own now-historical reading of him.

In any case, he's a contemporary philosopher in the British-American analytic tradition--with all its tremendous common sense and ease of access to the new reader--and yet he is unafraid to approach the mind-body problem and related phenomenology in a way that refuses reductionism and refuses reductive narratives of the science-minded that sometimes seem to pose, if not as a last-word on the subject, then certainly with the presumption of having the only valid approach.

One can dismiss radical Cartesian dualism and still not find in the competing narratives of science any robust account that accommodates or apprehends the irreducible character of conscious experience.

And no, that fact in isolation may not mean much to the average person on the street, and meditating on the subject may not advance your quality of life in any discernible degree--but it's there for people who want to go there.

The Steve Sailers of the world might do well to stop cherry-picking and pretending to revere thinkers who turn out to be easy targets for facile criticism. Take on a Thomas Nagel, instead, Steve. Challenge a real heavyweight and see how far your bullying approach and wild generalizations will get you. I think you'd find yourself a knife-wielding man in a gunfight, and you'd be dispatched without the slightest trace of personal enmity.

But the only value Weinberg ever found in reading philosophers was when they refuted other philosophers who had clouded his mind.

He kind of demonstrates your entire point in the first paragraph, negating most of the remainder of his article.

Exactly. And what really fascinates me about his article is how, in order to show how dumb philosophers are, he takes a completely marginal philosopher, David Stove, and attacks him as if he were considered a typical representative of that strange species, "the philosopher." It's low and it's cheap.

Not only low and cheap, but a perfect example of the selection bias (non-representative sample) that he attributes not only to Stove, but generally to every member of the strange species. He should cast a little wider if he wants to convince us that an ineptness for statistical reasoning is what chiefly characterizes philosophers.

I'm a fan of the British-American analytic tradition in philosophy. Numerous contemporary thinkers are carrying on in this tradition just fine. From the top of my head, let me recommend The View From Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. Nagel takes up provocative ideas in simple terms that any normal literate person can understand. For example, if you'd like a thought experiment that doesn't insult your intelligence, try Nagel's paper "What is it Like to be a Bat?"

Not only is this paper still fresh and relevant despite it's antiquity (1974) when indexed to the push of science, but it does a great job of demonstrating that the mind-body problem is not exhausted by discoveries in neurology, evolutionary biology or related physical sciences.

It remains an irreducible fact of consciousness that there is "something it is like to be a bat." The phenomenology of that experience is utterly inaccessible to us. It is something we get no nearer to by reductive, objective explanations of echolocation in mammals and the firing of bat neurons. The best our theories and accumulations of scientific fact could possibly do for us at the current moment is inform our imaginations. But we'd still be speculating wildly as we try to imagine what it is like to be a bat.

Less obvious, but crucial, is the recognition of otherness in people. I don't know if Nagel would go with me here, but I'll say this: You can accumulate biographical facts pertaining to a person with obsessiveness and precision and a push to be exhaustive, and you'll never know exactly what it is like to be that person. But it will likely be less of a radical challenge than imagining the subjective experience of another species.

Why is any of this relevant to the persistence and salience of the mind-body problem? Because it remains an objective fact of the universe that there are classes of subjective experience that can't be accounted for in objective scientific narrative or language. And this is enough to warrant that any hasty "scientism" of reductive metaphor that reduces consciousness to the biological mechanisms that likely underpin it, is a narrative of science insufficient for a robust understanding of the topic under consideration, still less a complete account. What's more, the narrative of the physical sciences rests on a set of tools and assumptions that are excellent for acquiring certain kinds of knowledge, but wholly inadequate for other classes of knowledge. Again, I'm not sure if Nagel would go with me there, entirely, but I'm giving you my own now-historical reading of him.

In any case, he's a contemporary philosopher in the British-American analytic tradition--with all its tremendous common sense and ease of access to the new reader--and yet he is unafraid to approach the mind-body problem and related phenomenology in a way that refuses reductionism and refuses reductive narratives of the science-minded that sometimes seem to pose, if not as a last-word on the subject, then certainly with the presumption of having the only valid approach.

One can dismiss radical Cartesian dualism and still not find in the competing narratives of science any robust account that accommodates or apprehends the irreducible character of conscious experience.

And no, that fact in isolation may not mean much to the average person on the street, and meditating on the subject may not advance your quality of life in any discernible degree--but it's there for people who want to go there.

The Steve Sailers of the world might do well to stop cherry-picking and pretending to revere thinkers who turn out to be easy targets for facile criticism. Take on a Thomas Nagel, instead, Steve. Challenge a real heavyweight and see how far your bullying approach and wild generalizations will get you. I think you'd find yourself a knife-wielding man in a gunfight, and you'd be dispatched without the slightest trace of personal enmity.

It's fascinating, to me, how sensible you are about things.

Me, I have difficulty with the analytic tradition, but I'm a student of continental philosophy. I'd like to see Steve Sailer take on a continental giant like Adorno or Laclau, two very different thinkers with a lot to say about the world. They write about things that matter to many people, even if the WAY they write is a turn off to most.

Mark, you studied philosophy, did you not? I remember reading your post where you said that, I think. Well, although we come from very different schools, I have to say that your approach to this whole thing is exactly what the debate needs. I'm ready to admit the flaws of many French thinkers - obscurantism, lack of proper argumentation, even charlatanism sometimes - because I think that despite these flaws, continental philosophy has much to offer.

Look, I'm a pretty educated guy, and even I had trouble with Lacan and Hegel. Who doesn't? But if I persevere, it isn't because I want people to think I'm a genius and everyone else is stupid; I want to understand so that, someday, I can teach it with true pedagogical clarity. I want to be a lecturer and a writer, and there's nothing more rewarding for me on an intellectual level than deciphering a really difficult text.

My long dissertation is on the difficulty of prose and how meaning can be generated from "difficult knots" in the language of texts like Gravity's Rainbow. That is, how the language used in difficulty texts often shatters the boundaries of intelligibility at first glance, because it points towards its own incompleteness. But you know, my main argument is that SOMETIMES "meaning" can only be generated by the kind of difficult use of language that causes the whole relationship of language and subject to momentarily disintegrate. The ontological consequences of reading a text become part of the cause of meaning.

I know, I know. It sounds weird and pretentious, but my point is that I'm putting SO much thought and effort into this that I feel insulted by articles like this. Like, he's just pissing on what I do.

I will agree that the tone of the paper is rather demeaning. The author does, however, seem to suggest that there are philosophers who aren’t on his shit list:

"Fortunately, one school of philosophy has actually taught us some valuable lessons over the centuries: the anti-abstract British tradition of Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and David Hume, with its emphasis on realism, common sense and the scientific method."

My own thoughts are that philosophy, particularly early on, informed science. It was from philosophy that the scientific method was born. But I also believe that there is a lot of philosophy out there that seems to have missed the fact that science exists and could answer many of the supposed questions they still puzzle about. I am most bothered by philosophy that seems to spiral-argue itself into absurdity. Maybe the horror of such examples stick in my head more than good rational philosophy, so my perception is skewed(as you would argue is the case with Steve Sailer). And maybe, having not studied philosophy as extensively as some of you, I'm missing something.

Not only is this paper still fresh and relevant despite it's antiquity (1974) when indexed to the push of science, but it does a great job of demonstrating that the mind-body problem is not exhausted by discoveries in neurology, evolutionary biology or related physical sciences.

Ok, I read the paper, but I honestly don’t see how it poses any threat to the Steve Sailer article. Now, my training is science(double masters in math and physics) so consider me to have a scientific bias and I consider you to know far more about philosophy than I do, so bear with me. I’m going to try to explain myself here and I fully expect for you to come back with counter arguments to everything I say. I fully accept that I may be speaking out of ignorance here.

It remains an irreducible fact of consciousness that there is "something it is like to be a bat." The phenomenology of that experience is utterly inaccessible to us. It is something we get no nearer to by reductive, objective explanations of echolocation in mammals and the firing of bat neurons. The best our theories and accumulations of scientific fact could possibly do for us at the current moment is inform our imaginations. But we'd still be speculating wildly as we try to imagine what it is like to be a bat.

Less obvious, but crucial, is the recognition of otherness in people. I don't know if Nagel would go with me here, but I'll say this: You can accumulate biographical facts pertaining to a person with obsessiveness and precision and a push to be exhaustive, and you'll never know exactly what it is like to be that person. But it will likely be less of a radical challenge than imagining the subjective experience of another species.
Why is any of this relevant to the persistence and salience of the mind-body problem? Because it remains an objective fact of the universe that there are classes of subjective experience that can't be accounted for in objective scientific narrative or language.

How do you mean? I don’t see why a subjective experience can’t be reduced to simply being the result of complex biological processes. It is a process that takes place in the brain and body of a creature or person different from you, hence you do not have the experience, but that doesn’t put it outside the realm of objective reality.

And this is enough to warrant that any hasty "scientism" of reductive metaphor that reduces consciousness to the biological mechanisms that likely underpin it, is a narrative of science insufficient for a robust understanding of the topic under consideration, still less a complete account. What's more, the narrative of the physical sciences rests on a set of tools and assumptions that are excellent for acquiring certain kinds of knowledge, but wholly inadequate for other classes of knowledge. Again, I'm not sure if Nagel would go with me there, entirely, but I'm giving you my own now-historical reading of him.

What are the classes of knowledge unobtainable by science? The subjective experiences of others? This isn’t really a limitation of the scientific method so much as it is a simple limitation of the person making the observation. It’s like trying to record sound with a camera(one that takes pictures, no video with sound, for argument’s sake). Ok, it can’t be done. Doesn’t mean the sound isn’t there. It means there are observations that are physically unobtainable by the camera, but I don’t see as it constitutes a different class of knowledge—ie, a class that would be subjective in any way...hmmm...I discuss this more later, read on...

In any case, he's a contemporary philosopher in the British-American analytic tradition--with all its tremendous common sense and ease of access to the new reader--and yet he is unafraid to approach the mind-body problem and related phenomenology in a way that refuses reductionism and refuses reductive narratives of the science-minded that sometimes seem to pose, if not as a last-word on the subject, then certainly with the presumption of having the only valid approach.One can dismiss radical Cartesian dualism and still not find in the competing narratives of science any robust account that accommodates or apprehends the irreducible character of conscious experience.

I don’t get this line in bold. From what evidence is this claim made? Note that there’s a big difference between saying science has not yet found the answer and saying science cannot find the answer.

And no, that fact in isolation may not mean much to the average person on the street, and meditating on the subject may not advance your quality of life in any discernible degree--but it's there for people who want to go there.
The Steve Sailers of the world might do well to stop cherry-picking and pretending to revere thinkers who turn out to be easy targets for facile criticism. Take on a Thomas Nagel, instead, Steve. Challenge a real heavyweight and see how far your bullying approach and wild generalizations will get you. I think you'd find yourself a knife-wielding man in a gunfight, and you'd be dispatched without the slightest trace of personal enmity.

I’ve never understood the mind-body problem. Seems the “mind” is just the name we’ve given the complex dynamical processes in our brain. Subjective experiences are physiological processes of a person or creature that can be analyzed objectively. Science goes about making objective observations (those which could be agreed upon by anyone else doing the same experiment.) Subjectivity is an individual experience, but it is also simply the result of a physical process.

There might be things which we cannot conceive. We believe in the existence of things which we cannot conceive(what it is like to be a bat, for example). But we have brains, bats have brains, our brains give rise to our consciousness, so we assume theirs does as well. But what is it like to actually be a bat? Can this be determined scientifically? Could we know that experience? No—we could never be a bat. No reasonable scientist would ever doubt that there are things which are beyond our experiences.

So no one can know really what the subjective experience of another is. Ok. That doesn’t mean there’s a mind separate from the biology of the body. All the workings of the brain of a person could(hypothetically) be measured(because they exist), could be listed categorically and objectively, could be observed for patterns and could be broken down to the point where we could see that person X will say the words “I am sad” and produce tear drops, have a rise in their blood pressure, etc, etc in response to certain stimuli—we could physically see all the processes behind their experience. We do not feel their experience because it is simply not our body that is going through it, but it is all still the result of physical processes. Why is there a philosophical conundrum associated with the fact that we are not them? What it means to experience something is simply that it is your brain and body having those reactions.

So, does it boil down to how do we imagine what those feelings are?

We are observational tools in a sense. Trying to perceive something which we are incapable of perceiving would be like trying using a camera to try to pick up sound. The camera can’t. Ok. So what? The human can’t have a bat experience. Ok. So what? Is the argument that the bat experience is a different kind of knowledge which we cannot have? Ok. What can we do about that? Calling it a different kind of knowledge doesn’t seem to do anything but give it a name and I don’t even really see how it could be given the name of “knowledge” if it is something that is wholly inaccessible to us simply because we are not the bat. Just like the camera can’t record sound. Ok. Camera can’t do anything about that. You could write out the notes of a song and take a picture of it with the camera, though. All the information of the song will be there in that visual image. But it isn’t the same thing as the sound created when playing it. If the camera did have the tools at its disposal, it could create and “hear” the music from the information obtained in the picture--but then, it would no longer be a camera. We could have all the data associated with another person’s conscious state, but because we are not them, we do not experience that state. I guess I’m not seeing why this is an issue. It’s just how it is.

I must admit that I also found the article to be rather infuriating because and it also reminded me of people whose views clash with my own. I've always viewed science as a sub-sect of philosophy, it's the study of the material.

Another big problem I have with the article is that is insists that philosophers tend to follow the methodology of Plato and utilize elaborate and abstract argumentation, such as writing dialogs. Like Eddy pointed out, Socrates/Plato's methods allowed for some pretty dangerous conclusions. It's my understanding that the rules of Aristotlean and Boolean logic dictate philosophical argumentation. Don't these same rules apply to the scientist or mathematician? Math is just applying logic to numbers rather than words. I understand why Sailer would be critical of some postmodern philosophers, such as subjectivists or solipsists, but to criticize philosophy by claiming it includes these thinkers but somehow excludes those whom he finds agreeable (such as Hume) is just silly.

I find this "science explains everything" way of thinking to be dangerous because it gives one an excuse to disregard ethical issues. Just because some philosophical issues are (for the most part) resolved, such as materialism vs. dualism or objectivity vs. subjectivity, doesn't mean that all philosophical issues are resolved. This article seems to characterize philosophy as asking nonsensical questions such as "why is red green?" while this is simply just not the case.

I find philosophy to be extremely interesting, it's something I wish I knew more about. Even when discussing mind-boggling, unanswerable questions such as those regarding the nature of reality or infinity, just participating in critical thinking helps sharpen one's mind. I liked the chess analogy (I love chess). For me, crushing my opponent like I'm Bobby Fischer is immensely satisfying. But what's more satisfying is when I discover something new about the game, even if it's through defeat.

I know, I know. It sounds weird and pretentious, but my point is that I'm putting SO much thought and effort into this that I feel insulted by articles like this. Like, he's just pissing on what I do.

Well, on the one hand, he is easily dismissed. For however sloppy his argument--and it is--he's become a philosopher/cultural critic just by taking up subjects of this kind and entering the arena of public debate with fairly refined interests. Only, he hasn't proven himself to be a very good one. His attack is miscalculated and recursive.

On the other hand, if you choose to do philosophy on a professional level, as a professor and an academic scholar, just expect that inter-departmental biases and rivalry will occasionally cast aspersions on your discipline. I've encountered more than one academic in the special sciences with insufficient respect for intellectual history and no notion at all of what philosophy is and what makes it relevant even today.

For example, I once walked into a statistics class with a copy of Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet. Dennet is well-known as a popular writer on these topics with a scientific and almost anti-philosophical bent. Dennet is a physicalist/materialist who could do a finer job of debating with Nagel than most. You could say I was examining the other side of the debate. None-the-less, the very presence of this book won me instant pre-class ridicule of my major from the statistics professor.

"Consciousness Explained" says the stats professor with a condescending smile, almost a chuckle. "The author, is he a philosopher?"

"You could say that," I reply. "But he's a bit more of a popular science writer, in certain regards, with a real fondness for interdisciplinary studies that approach the study of consciousness from the standpoint of fields like cognitive psychology and computer science."

"Consciousness Explained." He shakes his head. "You know, if I ask this person and this person and this person, if I ask five different people, what is your philosophy of life, then I'll get five different answers."

"Well, that may be," I concede "But philosophy can also be an extremely systematic study that proceeds on rigorous logic. Academic philosophy is more than just a feast of wild speculation."

From here he begins making assertions about how statistics holds the real keys to knowing anything that matters. And I make counterpoints--chiefly that pure statistics has no field of application and can't be related to our experience of the world in any meaningful way without proceeding through the lens of one or another set of philosophical presuppositions.

His only retort to that is, "I'll have to show you." (i.e., Stay around long enough and I'll teach you something real little philosopher boy.)

I didn't. However, I did write an award-winning essay on the rightful place of the humanities in contemporary university education and how the world is progressively blind to it.

Along the same time, I was enrolled in a logic class under the tutelage of Scott Davison, a stellar philosophy professor and all-around great guy who came to us from the University of Notre Dame. As it was an intro class, Scott was teaching us informal logical fallacies that are great fun and well-suited for all undergraduates to study.

Here's how Scott taught us the fallacy known colloquially as The Fallacy of Misleading Vividness:

When he was an undergraduate student, Scott had a girlfriend who refused every plea to wear a seatbelt, whether driver or passenger in a car. Her reasoning was thus: Her brother had been in a terrible accident while driving alone. The driver's side of his car was utterly demolished. And the force of the initial impact deposited him to the passenger side, which went relatively undamaged. While his injuries weren't light, he survived just fine. EMT's reported that had he been wearing his seatbelt, he would have died. And in this instance, their claim was likely true. Because of the vividness and personal closeness of the incident, the man's sister, Scott's girlfriend, refused ever to wear a seatbelt. And this was her firm and irrational decision based on one incident, even though any number of reputable studies have amply demonstrated that well over 90 percent of the time, you're vastly better off in an accident if you're wearing your seatbelt. She had no sound reason for assuming that any future accident she might be involved in would replicate the unlikely benefits of going without one.

And guess what I was learning besides a common logical fallacy? I was learning something basic about statistical reasoning. Imagine, getting a load of arrogance from the stats professor, and sound albeit basic statistical reasoning from the philosophy professor. What's more, Scott's way of teaching it through narrative makes a positive use of vividness, while awesomely teaching about the fallacious and misleading side of personally vivid stories. I remember the lesson in a more profound way for that use of narrative than anything I learned in stats. Yes, it's vastly useful to know the difference between mode, median, and mean, and how to use the statistical functions of a spreadsheet array, but even more basic to sound reasoning that applies to real-life (and death) circumstance is to understand the fallacy of misleading vividness.

That's the kind of wild speculation and ungrounded cant I was piddling around with over in the philosophy department.

Another example: A professor in an undergraduate psychology course I attended talked at length about Freud and Adler, but quickly wrote off Jung as a guy with "some weird ideas." I spent a few minutes defending what I like about Jung before a bunch of green undergraduate psychology students no more fit than their professor to care about milestones in intellectual history. How can the analyst who invented terms like "archetype" and "collective unconscious" be regarded as anything less than a genius? Apparently those are mere trifles now if you're a serious psychology student, and not a a student of philosophy, literature, and the history of ideas.

I must admit that I also found the article to be rather infuriating because and it also reminded me of people whose views clash with my own. I've always viewed science as a sub-sect of philosophy, it's the study of the material.

I’ve always viewed science as the study of reality. Tell me, how does one objectively study the immaterial? That’s a trick question—it doesn’t actually lend itself to objective study—if you actually could study it in any meaningful way, it wouldn’t be immaterial. If the immaterial had some effect on your life, it wouldn’t be immaterial.

I find this "science explains everything" way of thinking to be dangerous because it gives one an excuse to disregard ethical issues.

Wow, you are seriously touting a MAJOR misconception! Science has never and will never claim to explain everything. It is nothing more than a way of obtaining knowledge based on observations. Think of the theory of gravity: every time you drop a ball in the absence of air resistance on earth, it falls at approx 9.8m/s/s. Will this always happen? Any scientist will tell you that we can’t know that for absolute certainty without dropping the ball an impossible exhaustive number of times, but after awhile, we see that it has always worked that way, so we deem it reasonable to make the assumption that it will continue to do so unless evidence shows otherwise—at which point we modify the theory to be consistent with the observed reality.

Science does not claim to have all the answers, science only claims to be, in its ideal form, a systematic and objective way of studying the world around us. It is scientific thinking that allows us to do everything we do in our daily lives. Advances in medicine, technology, etc, etc—all from logical reasoning and scientific advances. Science is not a cult. It is not a belief system. It is not some special bastard child of philosophy. It is, to date, the only reasonable systematic means by which we obtain objective knowledge that can then be applied in meaningful ways to our daily lives. It is the reality in front of us! Most importantly—it is something we all do! Not just weird crazy nerd people that no one can understand. We all make observations of reality and predictions based on those observations every day.

And science certainly does nothing to disregard ethical issues! Scientists are not some cult of robotic clones that never take into account human interactions. If you looked into it, I believe you would find that any reasonable morals tend to have some sort of reason behind them—they benefit society as a whole. Scientifically speaking, it makes sense that people would choose to be ethical because it benefits the species as a whole.

I’m wondering if the main crux of the dislike of the article is that people feel that philosophy can probe realms of knowledge that science cannot? All that’s really been successfully argued in my opinion is that there are things that may be not knowable or experienceable—such as what it is like to be a bat. What is philosophy gaining us here?

Vig—

I like your little tale about your philosophy vs stats professor. But I ask you this—it sounds to me like what your philosophy prof was teaching was logic and statistics. Could you define philosophy for me? Maybe the arguments against philosophy are arguments against those aspects of it which are perceived to be ungrounded in logic and reality. If we remove those, what’s left? Science, logic, math? What is it we are calling philosophy then?

I really don't mean to sound bitchy and I hope I'm not offending anyone here, but I'm trying to explain my views of the world and trying to understand everyone elses. There are things I may be wrong about and things I'm just not understanding. I've often felt the way the author of the article does about philosophy, though I agree that he does not have a well fleshed out argument and comes across as demeaning. I think it's awesome we have some philosophers on here to argue the philosopher's point of view. Please help me understand!

I must say that i'm with Gayle on all of this. Though, her level of expertise far outshadows mine.

And, i mean, philosophy can be useful, but, i think, when it isn't based in facts or grounded by science, then it loses all of its appeal and relevance to me.

On the ethical topic, like Gayle said, science doesn't disregard this. Codes of behavior or being prosocial are not anomalous human characteristics. They're evolutionary. I argue, and have before on here, that even the progenesis of religion is evolutionarily based. It strengthened communities and social structures, it facilitated human development, even allowed for scientific and artistic advancement. I really think that all things worth knowing can be measured or defined by science. Maybe not day or even this century, but someday.

And, yeah, like Gayle said, science doesn't have some secret motive. It's only purpose is to advance knowledge, which, in turn, should improve human life. That idea that knowledge improves life goes way back to Plato and before. Science isn't fighting philosophy.

I'll agree that the article may have made some cheap shots, but that doesn't make him completely wrong. Yeah, to dismiss philosophy is silly, but philosophy that ignores science and math is irrelevant.

And i think that's the real difference. Philosophy bred science to deal with the nitty gritty issues of reality. Philosophy's only place, i think, like religion's, is in the immaterial. Science will figure out what is observable and measurable, philosophy can speculate about the rest.

Ethical questions do concern the immaterial even though they're not supernatural. I'm a big fan of Immanuel Kant because he examined ethics utilizing logic, which is an objective way to study the immaterial. Any ethical theory must be universal because it must be to be consistent. The only way to judge what would be a just way of treating others would be to hypothetically redirect your actions onto yourself. Hence logic arrives at the golden rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. That's a big generalization, but I think it illustrates that the immaterial can be objectively studied utilizing reason.

For the second part of your post--I never said that science claims to have all the answers. Steve Sailer claims that science has all the answers, and it was his article I was refuting. I support science as a way of understanding the way the material world works, but it irks me when guys like Sailer claim that studying statistics is a better way to understand all of reality than rational philosophy. Statistics is a way of measuring things and not all questions can be answered with a ruler. That's like measuring the quality of one's life by how many years they live.

I disagree that logic is objective. It can be, but it is not inherently objective.

What we actually are finding out is that most things can be measured. Maybe not yet, but technology and science really follows explonential growth. It took us millions of years to discover that DNA was a thing. Within fifty years, we've mapped the genomes of most species. And that extreme rate of progress is across the boards in biological sciences.

Philosophy helped a lot of that as did other sciences. We knew there were atoms far before we could measure them. Philosophers were never stupid and usually led us on the right track, or, not usually, but they could, and when we were able to prove or disprove the hypothesis, we did. I reckon within 100 years, we'll know just about all there is to know about the brain. In a lot of cases, it's just a matter of technological development.

I must say that i'm with Gayle on all of this. Though, her level of expertise far outshadows mine.

And, i mean, philosophy can be useful, but, i think, when it isn't based in facts or grounded by science, then it loses all of its appeal and relevance to me.

On the ethical topic, like Gayle said, science doesn't disregard this. Codes of behavior or being prosocial are not anomalous human characteristics. They're evolutionary. I argue, and have before on here, that even the progenesis of religion is evolutionarily based. It strengthened communities and social structures, it facilitated human development, even allowed for scientific and artistic advancement. I really think that all things worth knowing can be measured or defined by science. Maybe not day or even this century, but someday.

I have a problem with trying to use evolution to explain away everything we do. One of the things I really like about Steven Jay Gould is how he demonstrates that a trait doesn't have to have a survival advantage to persist, it simply must lack a disadvantage to survival. Some traits don't affect survival. Although it's been argued both ways, it's very questionable whether a self-reflecting consciousness had any survival benefits for our ancestors. It's very likely that contemplating existence has a negative impact on survival.

Anyway, concerning the ethical, an ethical question is one which asks how ought something be. It's not, "what should we do to ensure survival," but "what is the right course of action?" If you assume that ethics are just an evolutionary advantage to our species, it's hard to view any action as right or wrong.

I’m kind of wondering, maybe some of this argument boils down to definitions. I’ve always lumped logical reasoning in with scientific thinking. I guess in thinking of philosophy as its own entity, I lump into it an abundance of false premise arguments and things dealing with the supernatural. To me, the useful parts of philosophy are those that I do not see as distinguished from basic reasoning and scientific principles. This is why I asked VP for his definition of philosophy. (I also think many philosophical arguments could easily be resolved by clear definitions—I feel like I’ve seen many insane arguments that never reached common ground simply because people were operating with different definitions or the terms they were using).

RazorSharp--

As far as immaterial—I think this was another definition misconception. I took your use of it to mean supernatural. You are now claiming you take it to mean non-physical in the made-up-of-matter sense. But this does not put it outside of science then, as you were claiming. Science can study human interactions and sociological aspects of society and many other essentially non-physical things.

Also, could you point out where in the article the author claims science explains everything and we don’t need ethics?

I have a problem with trying to use evolution to explain away everything we do. One of the things I really like about Steven Jay Gould is how he demonstrates that a trait doesn't have to have a survival advantage to persist, it simply must lack a disadvantage to survival. Some traits don't affect survival. Although it's been argued both ways, it's very questionable whether a self-reflecting consciousness had any survival benefits for our ancestors. It's very likely that contemplating existence has a negative impact on survival.

What is your problem with evolution and how does SJG's ideas support your problem? Saying that a trait persisted simply because it wasn't a disadvantage is still an evolutionary explanation. You claim self-relfecting consciousness would be disadvantageous(and hence should not persist?) but you offer no evidence to back up this claim? This could be a good discussion, but you need to offer something to work with.

Anyway, concerning the ethical, an ethical question is one which asks how ought something be. It's not, "what should we do to ensure survival," but "what is the right course of action?"

Could these not both be the same question? The right course of action would be the one that makes everyone’s lives better, right? Why else would we call it the right course of action?

If you assume that ethics are just an evolutionary advantage to our species, it's hard to view any action as right or wrong.

Couldn’t the labels of right or wrong be defined as right=advantageous to species, wrong=harms species? It seems like this is just word play. I guess I'm not understanding what you are trying to argue here.

Dude, my passion for my point of view is clouding my arguments. Here is a direct quote from your original post:

I've always viewed science as a sub-sect of philosophy, it's the study of the material.

I made leaps here--you never even gave a definition of immaterial. I made up what your definition of immaterial was and so on, and so on. My apologies. Please call me on my bullshit and feel free to tell me to be nicer. I will try to stifle my passion and remain objective.

We could have all the data associated with another person’s conscious state, but because we are not them, we do not experience that state. I guess I’m not seeing why this is an issue. It’s just how it is.

Alright. Rip me apart. What am I missing?

You can have the reaction, if you like, that Nagel's viewpoint is true but trivial. When philosophy is done in a meticulous fashion that covers its bases well and leaves nothing open to easy rebuttal, it's a common enough criticism. You've said something here that makes sense but you've expended a lot of words to not say very much. What new ground does this capture for us? It isn't just scientists who have that response. Other philosophers often come back with that response.

I would argue that Nagel's point is not trivial because it keeps us from forgetting that an objective account, however nearly exhaustive, never completely exhausts nor expends the subjective quality of experience, and therefore never reduces or diminishes or captures it. There are other kinds of subjectivity that our knowledge has very little purchase on, and likely never will. That may sound obvious, but it's a truth that is often obscured by the externalizing approach we take to knowledge. He helps us recall that the description is not the thing in itself.

Some people, for example, among the scientifically trained, see imaginative literature as a trifle and a diversion. Others might see it as a valid or perhaps even vital and necessary form of human expression and endeavor. As for me, I sure wouldn't want to have to do without the inarguable benefits of science in general, and medical science, in particular. If consigned to shipwreck on a desert island, acute appendicitis could be far more of a bother than the lack of reading material. But in the absence of appendicitis and presence of ample food, I would be telling myself stories about the possibility of rescue. I'd likely invent whole mythologies and find ways to record them.

Here in the advanced and civilized world, if I had to suddenly choose between antibiotics and storytelling, it wouldn't be an easy choice. Imagine the choice is yours. But if you keep antibiotics in the world, all forms of storytelling cease as though they never existed. This isn't just books and movies and the narrative scriptings of certain video games. The disappearance of storytelling takes with it the personal anecdotes of the bartender, cab driver and barber, as well as your own. It takes away the sense of continuity you gain when you construct from memory a believable story about the person you were ten years ago. Narrative is easily as vital to us as medicine, even though it is also highly problematic--as in conflicts that arise from the competing narratives of ethnic identity and organized religion.

A world without narrative, if you take that thought as far as it can go, is a world we can't make sense of for ourselves in any way, and a world utterly unlike the one that we know. Absence of books and movies would be a mere surface ramification.

Within this world of (often competing) narratives, multiple narratives, polyglot and magnificent narratives, science provides one kind of storytelling, one species of cultural narrative, that when learned and practiced with due care, yields predictive powers and even remedies for things that make us ill. It's a noble and respectable cultural endeavor and a natural outgrowth of empirical philosophy. I don't deny it its stripes. And I object as readily as you to over-simplified and dismissive cultural images of the scientist as some mad aloof practitioner of atrocities, devoid of human feeling or the constraints of ethics. But let's bear in mind that the scientist, whether theoretical or practitioner, has inherited a vast cultural legacy that is surely embedded in the narratives of philosophy, along with several other forms of cultural emergence and situatedness.

Quote:

I like your little tale about your philosophy vs stats professor. But I ask you this—it sounds to me like what your philosophy prof was teaching was logic and statistics. Could you define philosophy for me? Maybe the arguments against philosophy are arguments against those aspects of it which are perceived to be ungrounded in logic and reality. If we remove those, what’s left? Science, logic, math? What is it we are calling philosophy then?

Philosophy is a lot of different things. Let me name just a few:

Philo - love
Sophia - wisdom

Love of wisdom. If we take Sophia in Her classical sense, philosophy is love and reverence for the Goddess of Wisdom.

In the modern, it can be many things. It can be a systematic endeavor to answer the seemingly simple question: "What is the good life, and how ought one live in order to obtain it?" That is the foundational question of ethics, which is a branch of philosophy. One question like that can encompass a lifetime of study. Religionists proceed on doctrine and special revelation about how they should live to achieve the good life. Philosophy, as a secular and independent endeavor, will look at religions' answers and consider them, but will not accept the Argument from Authority as a final word.

Philosophy could also be a lifelong study of aesthetics: What is beautiful and why?

It could be a lifelong study of metaphysics: What is the nature of the Real?

Or epistemology: How do we know what we know? With how much assurance?

Philosophy could also be a lifelong study of language--a study that engages and finds nourishment in the works of specialists (linguists, philologists, cognitive scientists, and others) but also transcends those particular studies.

Philosophy is both antecedent to and more general and comparative than the specialist sciences that emerge from it. Psychology, for example, can be legitimately viewed as a scientific offshoot from Philosophy of Mind, which is a branch of Metaphysics. You can trace the Tree of Knowledge upward like that. For example, ages before Freud posited the personal holy trinity of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego, Plato posited that Man (and Woman) is a creature of three souls: The Spirited Soul is the center of courage. Those in whom it predominates make good soldiers. The Rational Soul is the center of Wisdom. Those in whom it predominates should govern us. The Appetit Soul (related to appetite) is the center of cravings. Those in whom it predominates, if they avoid the perils of the libertine and practice the benefits of moderation and self-discipline, may realize their desires in a practical field of business. They should become shopkeepers, bankers and such.

Plato's narrative is senior to Freud's and Freud's wouldn't exist without it. Freud's theory feels vastly more modern and less prescriptive. Instead of telling us what role we should play in life based on our predispositions, it simply tells us that one virtual part of us, the Ego, has the function of dealing with Reality, while another, the Id, is the seat of irrational desires that will sometimes override the Ego. And yet a third, the Super-Ego, is the seat of conscience, the internalization of parental injunctions that constrain us toward socially acceptable behavior. If these things are out of balance, we could find ourselves in all sorts of trouble.

Freud's position is intellectually dependent on some of the best thinking of the ages, and nonetheless vital to the development of psychology in Victorian times. Freud himself becomes antecedent to more empirically minded behaviorists, out to measure the very parameters of stimulus and response, and to behavioral medicine of every kind.

There is an unbroken chain of connecting narratives behind every modern science. Psychology just affords an example I know pretty well. And none of this is to say that philosophy is superior because it came first. And none of this, at least on my own account, is to say that science is the ungrateful bastard child. At root, it's quite silly to wall these things off from one another as competitors vying for supremacy. To do so is largely an outgrowth of the culture of institutional learning, a culture that insists on dividing itself into departments.

Dude, my passion for my point of view is clouding my arguments. Here is a direct quote from your original post:

I've always viewed science as a sub-sect of philosophy, it's the study of the material.

I made leaps here--you never even gave a definition of immaterial. I made up what your definition of immaterial was and so on, and so on. My apologies. Please call me on my bullshit and feel free to tell me to be nicer. I will try to stifle my passion and remain objective.

Oh, it's n/p. There's a lot of text in this thread and it's late. But just to clarify, I don't believe in any supernatural forces.

Another clarification, I wasn't attacking the theory of evolution either, I just don't like how guys like Dawkins reduce every aspect of life to evolution. I kind of felt like Eddy was doing this when he referenced religion/ethics as having an evolutionary advantage. I think that the way evolution is taught, in classic Darwinian fashion, leads to confusion as a lot of the refinements to the theory by Gould are neglected. It just seems to me like using Decartes to teach geometry--he deserves the initial credit but it's advanced so much since then.

"To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.) Today's postmodern philosophers deny the very existence of science, nature and truth, largely because their favourite verbal abstraction of "equality" is undermined by the brute statistical reality of human biological differences."

Mark made this point much better than I ever could, but basically Sailer attacks a quality of certain post-modern philosophers and then applies it to all philosophers. It seemed to me that this was his thesis. His condescending attitude toward "equality" is what really struck a nerve. He's implying that abstract ethical concepts like human rights are fantasies because they are fundamentally unscientific. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I read it. I don't think that belief in equality necessitates the denial of science, nature, and truth as Sailer portends. The fact that he claims that biological differences undermines the concept of equality is a major flaw in his thinking. Equality doesn't mean symmetry, or having the same physical worth (a tall person is worth more to a basketball team than a midget), equality means having equal moral worth. The fact that he neglects this leads me to believe that he doesn't believe in moral worth.

"What should we do to ensure survival" may be the same as "what is the right course of action?" but I don't think so. It just brings up too many issues which seem to clash with impulsive moral feelings. We could eradicate AIDS by testing everyone and putting the infected to death or quarantining them, but doesn't that just seem immoral? Then there is the Brave New World/1984 problem--people need to have a sense of worth or they tend to commit suicide. That people risk their lives for these abstract concepts such as equality or freedom makes the evolutionary value in such things suspect.

I like you, Mark. You always keep a level head and allow for real and proper discussions to take place. I also agree with a lot of what you're saying, i'll just pick at a few pieces.

Vig Pup wrote:

Within this world of (often competing) narratives, multiple narratives, polyglot and magnificent narrative, science provides one kind of storytelling, one species of cultural narrative, that when learned and practiced with due care, yields predictive powers and even remedies for things that make us ill. It's a noble and respectable cultural endeavor and a natural outgrowth of empirical philosophy. I don't deny it its stripes. And I object as readily as you to over-simplified and dismissive cultural images of the scientist as some mad aloof practitioner of atrocities, devoid of human feeling or the constraints of ethics. But let's bear in mind that the scientist, whether theoretical or practitioner, has inherited a vast cultural legacy that is surely embedded in the narratives of philosophy, along with several other forms of cultural emergence and situatedness.

This is an especially good paragraph and i don't think science would ever object to art's place in society. I know you're using narrative in a historical sense and not in a literary or whathaveyou sense, but i'm going to grab onto that line anyway. And i think the lines often become unclear when it comes to the best arts, and sciences, and philosophies. I mean, everyone is a philosopher in my mind, or at least has the potential to be. Philosophy informs art and science, which, in turn, inform philosophy. And that's where you get the best, when ideas are shared because all fields enrich one another and aren't meant to be mutually exclusive.

Quote:

Philosophy is both antecedent to and more general and comparative than the specialist sciences that emerge from it. Psychology, for example, can be legitimately viewed as a scientific offshoot from Philosophy of Mind, which is a branch of Metaphysics. You can trace the Tree of Knowledge upward like that.

This is great, too. And that's what i meant when i said i find philosophy most relevant when it has a grounding in sciences. Because, ultimately, it's all the same goal. It's also what i meant when i said some of the best philosophers are/have been mathematicians, scientists, whathaveyou.

Science has to come from philosophy because someone had to ask the question. At least initially. Chemistry didn't just happen on accident and neither did physics. I actually tend to look at all of this on a gradation like this:
Philosophy
Psychology
Biology
Chemistry
Physics
Anthropology and sociology and the like are more or less at the same level as psychology. That gradation is from big to small, in a sense. Broad to specific. As you go down the scale, things get smaller, more specific. I mean that in a general sense. There's no denying the variability and specificity in each of those sciences. Psychology, for example, is broken up into multiple areas of focus, as is biology, chemistry, physics, and so on. There are gradations in all of these fields, and that doesn't mean one is better than the other. It does, however, mean that certain fields or even fields within fields are better suited to giving a proper answer.

It's actually why i dig neuroscience. It's really a synthesis of several different fields as seemingly disparate as linguistics and computer science. And the further science gets, the more integration there is.

I mean, sometimes the difference between scientist and philosopher isn't clear. Quantum Mechanics, which Gayle could explain far better than i could, is a whole system of thought based on a specific branch of physics. It's a philosophy, but it's also science. And the same holds true for many novelists, i think. Milan Kundera is a novelist, but there's no denying that he's just as much, if not more, a philosopher.

I feel like i keep losing track of what i'm talking about when i respond in this thread. I guess what i'm trying to say is: I agree or we agree. Or i agree with Mark. And Gayle. Or that i keep putting down a lot of words to say very little.

Dude, my passion for my point of view is clouding my arguments. Here is a direct quote from your original post:

I've always viewed science as a sub-sect of philosophy, it's the study of the material.

I made leaps here--you never even gave a definition of immaterial. I made up what your definition of immaterial was and so on, and so on. My apologies. Please call me on my bullshit and feel free to tell me to be nicer. I will try to stifle my passion and remain objective.

Oh, it's n/p. There's a lot of text in this thread and it's late. But just to clarify, I don't believe in any supernatural forces.

Another clarification, I wasn't attacking the theory of evolution either, I just don't like how guys like Dawkins reduce every aspect of life to evolution. I kind of felt like Eddy was doing this when he referenced religion/ethics as having an evolutionary advantage. I think that the way evolution is taught, in classic Darwinian fashion, leads to confusion as a lot of the refinements to the theory by Gould are neglected. It just seems to me like using Decartes to teach geometry--he deserves the initial credit but it's advanced so much since then.

I don't think many people hold strictly to the Darwinian model. What i meant was that evolution is a powerful thing and it's hard to delineate between what is a choice you made and what is a choice that was made for you. I think this is a problem that stems from the long tradition of believing consciousness is something outside of you or not really a part of you, like a soul or whathaveyou. Evolution predicts a lot of things and the reason i argue that religion is an evolutionary adaptation is because of it's usefulness in advancing civilisation. Yeah, lots of bloody wars were fought over these ideologies, but we've, for the most part, evolved past that.

Basically what i mean is that things don't happen on accident. Something as seemingly insignificant as having an opposable thumb has done incredible things for our evolution. I believe that's why primates have the intelligence they do. It made it possible to manipulate tools and some primates just kept getting better at it. Evolution makes sense because it has to. It doesn't have all the answers, but it has a lot of them.

This is a bit anecdotal, but i think it's interesting. i've been doing cognitive psychology research for the last couple years using a pretty simple experiment. We give a vignette and then a word list and then they're meant to recall as many as they can. It's been proven that deeper processing causes better memory in these tests, which stands to reason. For example, if you just tell a participant to read the list without any strategies, he'll do worse than if you had told him to create a narrative with the words. Emotional processing is deeper than processing of physical characteristics and so on. We've found, using survival processing, word recall is highest and outperforms all other levels of processing. That means, we'll give you a list [and these are fairly long lists, long enough that no one--outside of extreme outliers--would recall all the words or even close to all the words] and a scenario, such as, you're stranded on a desert island, and you will remember words that would be relevant to your survival better than if we had given you any other strategy. Of course, that means the list will include things like fire or knife or water or things like that, but it will also include words related to what we thought was the deepest level of processing.

Okay, so why's that interesting, and i surely didn't explain that as well as i should've or could've. It's interesting because it gives evidence or is at least indicative that survival is of the utmost importance to us and we process things related to our survival deeper than anything else. It's hardwired into us and, even if we're not aware of it, it's always in our minds.

That was a few leaps beyond what we're finding in this study, but things're pointing in that direction. Evolution is one of the most important, if not the most important, theory in biological sciences and it's relevant to all of them, which includes sociology, psychology, anthropology, and so on.

So, yeah, it doesn't have all the answers, but ethics is wrapped up in there, in my opinion. We tend to add a lot of words to things that we know almost inherently. It's part of being human, this need to explicate and make narratives.

Quote:

"What should we do to ensure survival" may be the same as "what is the right course of action?" but I don't think so. It just brings up too many issues which seem to clash with impulsive moral feelings. We could eradicate AIDS by testing everyone and putting the infected to death or quarantining them, but doesn't that just seem immoral? Then there is the Brave New World/1984 problem--people need to have a sense of worth or they tend to commit suicide. That people risk their lives for these abstract concepts such as equality or freedom makes the evolutionary value in such things suspect.

I don't see this as a relevant argument. Eradicating AIDS in the way you posit there is repulsive to us for a reason. It's not inherent in people to kill one another or exploit one another. We see the other in us and us in the other. I'd say this is a far more fundamental reason as to why the golden rule stands. There is far more benefit to being prosocial than there is to being antisocial, both evolutionarily and in terms of civilisation. We're hardwired to be social so we live, typically, in peace or a form of peace. We create laws to attempt to inhibit outliers, which we call criminals.

I said a lot about my view on ethics and morality in a different thread and i don't feel like repeating it right now. But i will say that i don't believe there are such things as right and wrong. These dichotomies are false and wrongheaded, in my opinion. Actions are simply that. They are neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. They just are.

I think there’s a lot of stereotyping out there of both the philosopher and the scientist. Sailer was stereotyping the philosopher as someone who reasons loosely with false premise and doesn’t check the absurdity of his conclusion with reality. And the thing is, I’ve seen this in philosophy, so I’m inclined to side with him. But what is my background in the subject? Read a few philosophers in high school, took two philosophy classes as an undergrad, spent a lot of time thinkin’ ‘bout stuff. I guess in the end, though, philosophy, like science, is something I, and probably everyone, does in their daily life. It’s rational thought, logical thinking. I think I simply equated the good parts of it with science in my mind.

Now, I’m going to pick on something: Your choice between medicine and narratives is one of those hypothetical philosophy posings that I honestly find annoying. Could you actually imagine a situation where those would be your choices? Seems a bit odd. I would argue that if you start drawing conclusions based on those hypothetical choices, you are doing one of those false premise arguments that I find so appalling in philosophy and which seem to lead to absurd conclusions. As an undergrad, I wrote a whole paper against the use of hypothetical worlds in philosophical argument, but I’ll spare you getting into that here.

Some people, for example, among the scientifically trained, see imaginative literature as a trifle and a diversion. Others might see it as a valid or perhaps even vital and necessary form of human expression and endeavor. As for me, I sure wouldn't want to have to do without the inarguable benefits of science in general, and medical science, in particular. If consigned to shipwreck on a desert island, acute appendicitis could be far more of a bother than the lack of reading material. But in the absence of appendicitis and presence of ample food, I would be telling myself stories about the possibility of rescue. I'd likely invent whole mythologies and find ways to record them.

Some people? Who? I wonder if this is a false stereotype of scientists(we are all unfeeling robots, you know…). I would hold that one could argue scientifically for the usefulness of art and fiction in our world. Also, just because one’s emotions and subjective responses can be boiled down to biological processes, does not diminish how those emotions feel. I don’t know why people(not necessarily you) seem to think that a scientific viewpoint prevents the sense of awe in things. That it somehow makes things ugly and cold. There’s this great quote from Feynman that these ideas always remind me of:

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."
I’d like to think I’m trying to set an example. I am trained in scientific disciplines, yet I am writing fiction(and not science fiction!), and taking up a new musical instrument. And all of this that I do, is rational, I think. All of it can be made sense of and in looking for why something is the way it is, it does not detract from it. It only adds.

RazorSharp-

I believe you are drawing rather absurd conclusions from Sailer’s argument. That quote indicates none of what you concluded from it. What it does show, is how Sailor is lumping philosophers into one category of ignorant thought.

He's implying that abstract ethical concepts like human rights are fantasies because they are fundamentally unscientific.

What I got was that he was implying that ethical arguments that do not include scientific study of cultural differences and how different groups of people interact in reality, are useless in the end. I would agree with that. I would not necessarily agree with his categorization that all philosophers are remaining ignorant of reality.

The fact that he claims that biological differences undermines the concept of equality is a major flaw in his thinking. Equality doesn't mean symmetry, or having the same physical worth (a tall person is worth more to a basketball team than a midget), equality means having equal moral worth. The fact that he neglects this leads me to believe that he doesn't believe in moral worth.

He does not claim that biological differences undermine anything—he simply claims that they should be taken into account when trying to understand what we mean by equality. How would you define equal moral worth?

"What should we do to ensure survival" may be the same as "what is the right course of action?" but I don't think so. It just brings up too many issues which seem to clash with impulsive moral feelings. We could eradicate AIDS by testing everyone and putting the infected to death or quarantining them, but doesn't that just seem immoral? Then there is the Brave New World/1984 problem--people need to have a sense of worth or they tend to commit suicide. That people risk their lives for these abstract concepts such as equality or freedom makes the evolutionary value in such things suspect.

I thing you oversimplify things. Your method for eradicating aids may on the surface be seen as most beneficial to the survival of the species, but people seem to agree that it is wrong. Why? I would say it has to do with the fact that we also hold some value to the current quality of life. The next generation is important, yes, but why should they live if their lives will suck? If they will live in a world where if they catch the wrong disease they will be jailed? Also, there are many impracticalities to implementing such a plan. Those being oppressed by this plan would revolt. We also risk losing diversity in the world by singling out certain populations, which can be seen as an evolutionary disadvantage. Our simple personal fears that we could be treated that way too might be enough and our desire for our own personal survival and quality of life come into play. The issue is a complicated one. I still hold that the ethical choice is there for a logical reason that could well be related to our biology. Risking lives for freedom—again, if you end up oppressed, your life sucks and also, you are less in control—less likely to survive if you don’t have control over your own fate. I think the reasons could be explored, but I think, ultimately you will find natural and biological reasons behind it all simply because we are biological organisms.

Eddy-

oh, I could go on and on about quantum mechanics...and what it does to determinisn...global and local hidden variables...mathematical frameworks vs conceptual understandings...

I don’t know why people(not necessarily you) seem to think that a scientific viewpoint prevents the sense of awe in things. That it somehow makes things ugly and cold. There’s this great quote from Feynman that these ideas always remind me of:

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."
I’d like to think I’m trying to set an example. I am trained in scientific disciplines, yet I am writing fiction(and not science fiction!), and taking up a new musical instrument. And all of this that I do, is rational, I think. All of it can be made sense of and in looking for why something is the way it is, it does not detract from it. It only adds.

I agree with this a lot. Science is not just dissection and tearing things apart. I mean, da Vinci and Michelangelo did that far before an anatomist did. And even when science is doing that, it only adds. The best scientists, the ones who we remember forever, who change the world, are the ones who never lose that childlike sense of wonder and awe. Science is a creative process that takes a great deal of imagination. Science is artistic and art can be scientific.

I writing fiction as well and can't even imagine writing science fiction, but the things i do understand about the world, the how and the why, those inspire me endlessly. How could they not? In a lot of ways, understanding makes it all the more beautiful, it doesn't reduce it.

I can only imagine it being reductive to someone who wants to believe that the sky is blue because of some sort of esoteric aesthetic. Understanding only deepens appreciation and beauty. Looking at a flower as just a thing is, to me, the same as looking at a foreigner as just a foreigner. You're discounting their culture, their past, their present. You're discounting or ignoring all the things that made that person the person he or she is.

Now, I’m going to pick on something: Your choice between medicine and narratives is one of those hypothetical philosophy posings that I honestly find annoying. Could you actually imagine a situation where those would be your choices? Seems a bit odd. I would argue that if you start drawing conclusions based on those hypothetical choices, you are doing one of those false premise arguments that I find so appalling in philosophy and which seem to lead to absurd conclusions. As an undergrad, I wrote a whole paper against the use of hypothetical worlds in philosophical argument, but I’ll spare you getting into that here.

Okay, I fail to understand your bias, unless simply a matter of personal taste. And it's fine if your tastes and my own differ on this point, but let's be clear that I'm not engaging in reasoning from a false premise. Here's a bit of sound syllogistic reasoning from two premises that I take to be true, therefore deriving a true conclusion. I'm sure you've seen this one:

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

If the premises are accepted, then the conclusion must follow. If the premises are both true, then so must be the inescapable conclusion. On the other hand, what if we plug a false premise into a proper syllogistic form?

1. All men are Martians.
2. Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is a Martian.

In this second example, the reasoning is sound, but one premise and therefore the conclusion are both false.

You can also have true premises that don't support your conclusion, because the reasoning isn't sound. Third example:

1. All living men reside on a planet.
2. The Earth is a planet.
Therefore, all living men reside on Earth.

Above, the conclusion may even be true, along with both premises, but the conclusion would be only incidentally true. It does not derive logically from the premises. It is logically possible, after all, that other inhabited planets exist.

In terrific contrast to reasoning from a false premise, I've illustrated a point by means of a thought experiment that engages a hypothetical choice. That hypothetical quality means that it isn't taken to be true. Obviously, it isn't a "live" choice and never will be. I will never be presented with chosing between the disappearance of antibiotics or the disappearance of all forms of narrative. It doesn't need to be a live choice to convey a point. The hypothetical is presented as a vivid way to clear ground for my assertion of the value and necessity of narrative. Just because it's hypothetical, doesn't mean it's an exaggeration. It's an efficient way to assert that Story is just as important as Medicine--which is a hell of a thing to assert if you can't put yourself and your reader into the mindspace of a forced choice between the two.

This isn't hot air. It's valid reasoning with hypothetical components used for the sake of illustration. Your impatience or distaste with this mode of explication doen't make it misleading or false.

Thanks for the illustration, but I do understand perfectly well what false premise is. It was late last night and I was rambling incoherently. I just told you my thoughts without offering any detailed explanation. So I bestow upon you here more of my ramblings.

In terrific contrast to reasoning from a false premise, I've illustrated a point by means of a thought experiment that engages a hypothetical choice. That hypothetical quality means that it isn't taken to be true. Obviously, it isn't a "live" choice and never will be. I will never be presented with chosing between the disappearance of antibiotics or the disappearance of all forms of narrative. It doesn't need to be a live choice to convey a point. The hypothetical is presented as a vivid way to clear ground for my assertion of the value and necessity of narrative. Just because it's hypothetical, doesn't mean it's an exaggeration. It's an efficient way to assert that Story is just as important as Medicine--which is a hell of a thing to assert if you can't put yourself and your reader into the mindspace of a forced choice between the two.
This isn't hot air. It's valid reasoning with hypothetical components used for the sake of illustration. Your impatience or distaste with this mode of explication doen't make it misleading or false.

If the hypothetical world does not exist, and most importantly, cannot be created to the hypothetical specifications due to, not just deficiencies in current technology, but it is inconsistent with reality, then I say that things in this world have no truth-value. Indeed any hypothesis you come up with in a non-realizable hypothetical world are untestable. There’s a big difference in my mind between saying “what if all narrative disappeared” and saying something like “what might happen if I toss a ball in the air at speed v?” The second of these is also hypothetical, but the premise—tossing the ball in the air is something we could do—makes sense. We could draw conclusions from it—we could use mathematical reasoning to figure out what the ball would do. And we could actually do something physical in the real world that would be consistent with this reasoning. This hypothesis would lead us to a conclusion that is useable. We could, for example, guess where the ball will land and when and be pretty assured that this guess is correct.

In the first question, however, I don’t see how we can draw any reasonable conclusions from it because I don’t even see how it is an implementable idea. How exactly would you remove all narrative? I would claim it can’t be done, so drawing any conclusions from the assumption that you could makes no sense to me, because that initial assumption seems false. You say we wouldn’t want narrative to be gone. Ok. I don’t think it could be. So….where’s the issue?

Of course, I am assuming by narrative you mean any story—written down, told, memorized. So, while it would make sense that you could remove the written stuff, how are you going to erase all narrative from your brain and still be you? Is it not an integral part of who you are? You use the stories in your head to relate to the world around you. How exactly are you getting rid of them? If you did mean just getting rid of all the written stuff, then what’s the point? You’ve erased a history there, but new stories can be made. It would be like making the antibiotic choice one where all bottles of antibiotic are destroyed, but they leave behind the instruction manual and the ingredients. Does this make sense?

So when I say that these hypothetical situations are false premise arguments, that’s kind of a sweeping statement and maybe I’m confusing false premise with inconsistent logic. Really the premise is fine—it’s stated with an “if”. “If the world were this way…” then lays down a set of axioms. But if the hypothetical situation is an unrealizable one then any conclusions will only apply to this hypothetical world and not reality. That’s where I see the issue. The false reasoning I see comes in where it is assumed that this hypothetical world relates to the real world in some objective manner when really, the hypothetical world contained elements impossible in the real world.

I’m not sure I’m making myself very clear. Does it make sense what I’m saying? I’m really just attacking the link between hypothetical worlds and ours when the hypothetical world contains elements that are impossible in ours. I don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from that.

So, how I’m seeing your argument is this: You say what if you chose medicine over narrative? You say that from following the results of this assumption, it becomes clear that surely you’d miss narrative. I say, ok, but it is impossible to make such a choice in the first place, so what’s the point? That narrative is important? This seems like an obvious point, especially being that the two can’t be separated. When was there ever an argument against narrative?

It’s like saying an almond joy wouldn’t be a very good almond joy without the nut. Ok. But it wouldn’t be an almond joy without the nut. It would be a mounds.

Now, I will say this—unrealizable hypotheticals aren’t necessarily useless either. They can inform other ideas. (science fiction for example, might inform science in the sense that a scientist might come up with an idea they wouldn’t have otherwise.) But in and of themselves, unrealizable hypothetical worlds are no different than fiction in my opinion and aren’t grounds for proving anything about the real world.

Anyway, your comments raise another problem I have with philosophy—when you say that maybe we just have different opinions. Well, then where’s the objectivity? To me, any knowledge that is universal must have objectivity. If we are to draw conclusions form philosophy using sound reasoning, shouldn’t we all be drawing the same conclusions if the reasoning is indeed sound?

Alright, gotta run. I hope my ignorance has not yet become intolerable, because I’m really enjoying this discussion. I’ve already got a ton of new ideas and perceptions buzzing in my head. o_O

It's not inherent in people to kill one another or exploit one another.

Perhaps not, but I don't see why altruism would be considered biologically inherent when people have been killing and exploiting one another just as long as they've been doing good deeds for one another. Early civilizations were often economically dependent on slavery, early armies were usually supported by pillaging. That we often prioritize ourselves over the next generation is the problem I see with viewing all of an organism's traits as necessarily beneficial to survival. Opposable thumbs are clearly beneficial and have contributed much to man's current state, but what about male nipples? There is a high degree of randomness involved.

Anyway, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one b/c the idea that there is no such thing as objective right and wrong has never fit within my worldview. Denying the existence of objective right and wrong, which is what I saw as the necessary conclusion of Sailer's article, requires that one use the physical sciences to explain such things.

Concerning Darwinism, Dawkins and his "selfish gene" model of evolution is what I find to overemphasize beneficial traits. While I agree that survival is extremely important to us, I tend to support a more humanistic approach to psychology. Once our physiological and emotional needs are fulfilled we tend to self-actualize and value things such as morals and aesthetics more than our own survival. Self-actualization to me is the mind transcending beyond that of an animal, beyond enslavement to biological determinism.

What I got was that he was implying that ethical arguments that do not include scientific study of cultural differences and how different groups of people interact in reality, are useless in the end. I would agree with that. I would not necessarily agree with his categorization that all philosophers are remaining ignorant of reality.

Ethical arguments claim that there are universal rules regarding the right/wrong ways of living. It's not a matter of observing what people do, like the sociologist does, ethics require judging these behaviors. Scientific study is irrelevant to ethics (in my worldview). One of the things I hate about sociology is how it devalues people. I respect the goal of attempting to study societies but the methodology just seems all wrong. Statistics may tell us what people do, but they do little to tell us what we ought to do. Sociologists tend to be ethical relativists because they try to understand people through a statistical analysis of what they do. I find a good novel to be much more insightful than the most prominent sociologists.

Behavior falls on a spectrum. Using a standard bell curve, i'd argue. 68% of behavior is considered standard/normal. One standard deviation away, and we're still pretty normal and most people's behaviors would fall in this range. That means that in 95% of people would do action X, Y, or Z 100% of the time. I would argue that this is where morality comes from.

People two standard deviations away are called criminals or terrorists or whatever other name you can think of. They're also, however, called heroes and include people like Mother Theresa. Human behavior can be measured and statistics is pretty reliable and very important. Psychology wouldn't be worth much if they didn't use statistics and use large populations to try to make generalizable rules or observations. That's not to say that the anecdotal evidence from a clinical psychologist is invalid. It's just not easily verifiable. Treatment X may have worked wonders for patient Y, but there's no telling if that same treatment will be good or even harmful for patient Z. It can be less compelling and less interesting for a lot of people to hear talk of p values and t-tests than it is to read or listen to Oliver Sacks speak, but both are important. I lean pretty heavily towards the school of experimental psychology and neuroscience, so i find the statistics much more valid than the anecdotal. I think one on one interviews and treatments are extremely useful, but they need to be generalizable to some degree in order to be worth much. It's the same thing with a hypothesis anywhere. You need to test and test and test and retest it to make sure it stands.

I got a bit sidetracked there. Anyway, behavior falls in a spectrum like this and it's why i don't believe in an objective wrong or right, don't even think the words mean much. We treat mental illness the same way. The 68-95%ers are the normal, the standard. The >95% are the schizophrenics, the bipolar, and whathaveyou. In a sense, we treat schizophrenics like we treat criminals. We lock them up, either in a cage or with drugs, in order for the rest of us to feel at ease. I don't see the criminal or the schizophrenic as wrong in any way, just like i don't see the policeman or the man who cures cancer as being inherently right. They're just different. Being different or unusual does not make something better or worse than another thing.

And that's something that bothers me a lot about ethics. Everything is looked at on a scale. Mills said that the fool satisfied is much worse than Socrates dissatisfied. Why? What makes Socrates or even Stephen Hawking's live better than mine? I can't do the things they do, but they surely can't do what i can do. We put humans on a pedestal as well, which i don't much like. Evolutionarily, there is a reason for that, but that doesn't make us better or worse than an elephant or a whale or even a catfish. They've evolved to the necessary point they had to, just as we have. Everything has a function in the world, in the universe. I don't see this as random.

Which brings me to this:

Quote:

Opposable thumbs are clearly beneficial and have contributed much to man's current state, but what about male nipples? There is a high degree of randomness involved.

I don't see where randomness comes into play here. Because we have nipples? I mean, this isn't how most would describe how this isn't random, but, aesthetically, we look better with them. Attractiveness and aesthetics are part of function and adaptation. There's no reason for a peacock to have so many colorful feathers except for aesthetics and seducing a mate. Nothing is random when it comes to evolution. We may not see why it's important or understand it's use, but it's part of the system, even if we can't see the lines connecting the dots. The world makes perfect sense, existence makes perfect sense. Our failings to understand existence or the way things work is not a failing of the system. It's just part of being human. We're limited. But, i mean, that limitation is pretty artificial. We're not really limited, we just think we should be more than we are, which is important and why humans endeavor for more and continue to evolve.

So, just because you think something is random doesn't mean that it is. It probably just means you or we or all people don't understand the system or mechanisms.

Quote:

Anyway, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one b/c the idea that there is no such thing as objective right and wrong has never fit within my worldview

I would like to hear a good argument as to why, objectively, there must be a right and wrong. I don't think it's necessary for us to disagree until we both know each other's stance.

Quote:

Concerning Darwinism, Dawkins and his "selfish gene" model of evolution is what I find to overemphasize beneficial traits. While I agree that survival is extremely important to us, I tend to support a more humanistic approach to psychology. Once our physiological and emotional needs are fulfilled we tend to self-actualize and value things such as morals and aesthetics more than our own survival. Self-actualization to me is the mind transcending beyond that of an animal, beyond enslavement to biological determinism.

Morals are built out of our need and desire to survive. It's just a language thing that makes you consider them different. We make contracts and laws to ensure peace in order to allow life to flourish. Morals are our fancy words for: behavioral codes that will benefit everyone.
And see, here, you're equating that humans are better than animals because we can discuss morality, essentially. We can be all we can be so we're better than that mountain lion or goat. Why? That animal is performing to the best of its abilities. It is all that it can be, so why is a human working to its potential better than an animal that does? This is where i like that thought experiment about the bat. You cannot know what it's like to be another animal, you can't even know what it's like to be another human, so how can you say that one is better than the other.

By your argument, people in first world countries are better than those in third world countries. Why? Because we produce more art? Because our moral laws are better? What is it? And if you take this step that we are better, what's to stop you from proceeding to imperialism and the White Man's Burden? These lesser humans, these savages, who barely scrape by with their near animal life, they need me to step in and take charge. You are not better because you've had the privilege of education and science.

Anyrate, i agree that, in developed countries, we focus more on aesthetics and whathaveyou than we do on our basic survival tendencies and necessities. But that's what i find interesting about the research i'm doing. Even though the average amerikan doesn't think about what they need to do to survive, they still process those things at the deepest level of processing. That survival part of us is still intact and still floating about just beneath the surface. Maybe even on the surface, we just give it all different names.

So when I say that these hypothetical situations are false premise arguments, that’s kind of a sweeping statement and maybe I’m confusing false premise with inconsistent logic.

Where is the inconsistency in my logic? What have I said that expresses contingency but does not follow logically from my preceding statements? What have a said that smacks of hasty generalization, argumentum ad hominem, argument from authority, assumed and unprovable causation (after this, therefore because of this) or any other well-known logical fallacies?

And again, I'd say a false premise would have to be a foundational claim in an argument taken to be true when it is not. In no sense am I asserting the truth value or provability or testability of "a world" where one could be confronted, realistically, with a choice between the disappearance of all forms of narrative or the disappearance of medicine. I'm not putting forward a truth claim and testing it. That isn't the only thing philosophy can do. Rather, I'm putting forward a thought experiment that invites the reader to think new thoughts about the weight and importance of narrative in our lives.

If that doesn't reach for you, just because it involves a hypothetical choice that could never be a live choice, then you aren't sensitive to the valid use of imagination in philosophical discourse. Not everything said is to be taken literally, just because we're engaged in Big Talk. Imagination has a role to play in philosophy, just as it does in science and art.

I'm kind of with Gayle on this kind of thing. I understand the point of the thought experiment, but they tend to be big What ifs, which i find little use for.

I don't think anyone would devalue narrative or art or how important story telling is. I mean, it predates written history, probably history itself, though history is its own narrative or tool for story telling.

That thought experiment poses medicine and art as opposites, which is pretty thoughtless, i think. I imagine you'd be hardpressed to find someone who thinks the world would be better without one. I'm sure people do value one higher than the other, but that's more a matter of subjectivity and preference than anything else.

Imaginative, i guess, but it doesn't add anything, in my opinion. It kind of reflects a false dichotomy, that arts and sciences are separate and even opposite, which, i think, is pretty far from the truth.

I mean, the logic's there and it's fine, but i don't see it amounting to much. Narratives are important. I agree. Wouldn't have disagreed. So we have a thought experiment, which isn't really an experiment, it's just a what if question.

How would life be different if humans could fly?

Yeah, that's an interesting question and we could probably have a discussion about it, but i don't think it's worth putting too much thought into. Like the brain in the vat thought experiment or the matrix. Yeah, they seem like an interesting topic, but i actually find them pretty boring and unfulfilling.

I don't think it's a failing of Gayle's or mine that we don't find that thought experiment interesting. Of course people would disagree, and they'll disagree with what i'm about to say. But i think of all these things much the same as i think of the god question.

Does god exist?

It doesn't matter to me because i can never know and will never know. To me, god existing or not existing has nothing to do with my life or the way i choose to live it. God is only an important question if you believe in one or not.

It's a much different discussion, of course, but it's similar. So, do i have a failed intellect because i see a question that has plagued man for thousands of years as boring and irrelevant? I, of course, would say, No.

And the same is true for that thought experiment, in my opinion. I understand its goal and the purpose of it, but i don't see any importance to it. And i really don't think it's worth more than a few seconds of thought, especially because to separate narrative and science is more than a bit nonsensical, which you went on to show.

I might also add: the belief that a statement has no value if its implications can't be tested and verified (or falsified) right here on Terra Firma is a dear assumption to the narratives of science. And it's an assumption that in many ways advances the practice of science. But over in the philosophy department, we call that curious orientation verification-ism. I hyphenate only because it's a long and awkward word.

Out in life and in the real world, we do all sort of performative acts with language besides making literal truth claims about the world around us. We also marry, and bless, and scold, and apologize, and complain, and praise, and defend, and inaugurate, and suppose. That only begins the list of the things we do with language that have a symbolic or non-literal dimension.

My discourses will never be constrained to literal statements only, but please correct me if I ever seem genuinely dull to the difference.

No, it doesn't. It poses them as equally vital and indispensable things. And it uses medicine as a shorthand for science of every kind, for surely medicine shows the greatest immediate practical benefits for practicing science. But the illustration was also meant to set up or clear the ground for the understanding that every form of science emerges from cultures driven and developed by the exchange of ideas. And the principal way that humans exchange ideas is through narrative.

There was a time when we had nothing like science or philosophy. Besides literal verbal exchanges to do with the immediate concerns of hearth and kin, we had only storytelling. Within that storytelling, we had oral histories of our peoples and we had mythologies--big stories about gods and heroes that were taken not only as entertainment, but as a form of instruction for the young.

There is no way to leap from that preliterate stage to the advances and benefits of modern science without passing through the age of philosophy. For in philosophy, the completely non-literal ways of codifying wisdom - that we enjoyed in oral histories, mythology and storytelling - these things give way to rational analysis. Our need for narrative doesn't cease, but it becomes augmented.

All of this sounds obvious and pedantic when I start spelling it out, but please recall that early posts from Gayle challenged the nature and value of philosophy. Everything good about it, she attributed to science, even though philosophy is the mother of sciences. She was surprised that I reported learning logic, including logic foundational to statistical reasoning, in a philosophy class. And the last time I checked, Logic is one of the four main branches of philosophy. Statistics is over in the math department, but logic is always taught in a philosophy department.

I hate to move recursively toward the pointless war of supremacy among academic departments, and the politics of how those things get administered, but it remains a thorn to me that even very educated people in the sciences often have no respect for the philosophy department at all, assuming it the refuge of lunatics and a museum of intellectual antiquities, and the center of pointless and uninformed debate. There's an arrogance and a disregard for intellectual history on the lips of many scientists, and I find it unappealing, unsavory and disrespectful. Also, easily dispelled among the better minds in science, when you point a few things out. Sorry if I've beat that horse past riding.

So when I say that these hypothetical situations are false premise arguments, that’s kind of a sweeping statement and maybe I’m confusing false premise with inconsistent logic.

Where is the inconsistency in my logic? What have I said that expresses contingency but does not follow logically from my preceding statements? What have a said that smacks of hasty generalization, argumentum ad hominem, argument from authority, assumed and unprovable causation (after this, therefore because of this) or any other well-known logical fallacies?

And again, I'd say a false premise would have to be a foundational claim in an argument taken to be true when it is not. In no sense am I asserting the truth value or provability or testability of "a world" where one could be confronted, realistically, with a choice between the disappearance of all forms of narrative or the disappearance of medicine. I'm not putting forward a truth claim and testing it. That isn't the only thing philosophy can do. Rather, I'm putting forward a thought experiment that invites the reader to think new thoughts about the weight and importance of narrative in our lives.

If that doesn't reach for you, just because it involves a hypothetical choice that could never be a live choice, then you aren't sensitive to the valid use of imagination in philosophical discourse. Not everything said is to be taken literally, just because we're engaged in Big Talk. Imagination has a role to play in philosophy, just as it does in science and art.

I feel like I'm repeating myself here because I thought I'd explained this all in my previous post. To answer your first question of where the flaw is in your logic--maybe it's simply that you didn't fully establish to me what your premise was. If you were to eliminate narrative then X, Y and Z would follow. Ok. HOW DO YOU ELIMINATE NARRATIVE? Seems you need to answer that before you start drawing conclusions as to how you would feel about it being eliminated. Do you mean burning all the books? Then I say you haven't eliminated it because the person on the deserted island still has the stories in their head. Do you mean erasing their memories of narrative and thier ability to form new narrative? Ok, then I say that fundamentally changes who they are in ways you did not address when making a conclusion as to how they would react to such a missing piece. There's too many gaps and unanswered questions for me. I can't even tell what your argument is. Again, as I said before, it seems like a nonsensical thing to say you can eliminate narrative from a person's life. How would you feel about yourself if I removed your brain? Well...you'd have no brain with which to process feelings, so what's the point of that question? If the only point you are trying to make with this argument is that narrative is important, well, this seems like a fundamental truth to me--it cannot be separated from the person. It is a thing that exists. It is used by people to relay information and tell stories. Why do you need to even present an argument in support of it? To me, it's like arguing that our brains are important. What if you had to make the choice between your brain and antibiotics? Um. What? First, that's absurd, and second you can't actually remove a person's brain and still have them be the same person. Third--no argument is needed to indicate the importance of the brain. It's there--it's part of you--you can't remove it without changing what you are. Does this make sense?

Where is the false premise? Maybe I was seeing it as this: The foundational claim taken to be true when it is not is the claim that if you were to remove narrative, you would still retain the ability to recognize that you are missing narrative. But maybe there is no false premise because your assumption is that you do retain this ability in your hypothetical world?

I kind of side with Eddy here that this is similar to religous arguments. IF we assume god exists and does X, Y, and Z, then we can draw all sorts of logical conclusions from that. Only problem is, all that is in made-up land. It doesn't actually inform or defend anything in reality. So what is it's purpose? Certainly not to draw any objective conclusions. Is it useless? NO! But it is not an objective way of making sense of the world. It is fiction, it is art, it is some form of playing with words and ideas. It can have value in that sense. I only take issue when it is used as reason for action, explanation for things. Your hypothetical situation in no way informs us that narrative is important. This conclusion cannot be drawn from that. This conclusion can, however be drawn form the reality in front of our noses--narrative is inherent in our culture and so widely used that we cannot separate from it. Hence narrative is important.

I take offense at your claim that I see imagination as having no use. I say it has great use. It's massively important. But as far as objective realities are concerned, it can only give people ideas of where to look. Hypotheses which to test. It can not lead to an objective understanding of the world around us. What I disagree with is when philosophy uses such imagination and thought experiments to draw supposedly objective conclusions. My only issue is that you seem to be claiming you are making sound reasoning out of a hypothetical world. But that reasoning only applies to the hypothetical world. You cannot draw conclusions in our real world from it--BUT YOU ARE when you say "See? Hence narrative is important." Such reasoning CAN inform testable ideas in the real world however. Again, I'm not discounting imagination--it can lead to a whole host of different ways to think about things--but I'm saying you can't derive fact from it.

Am I making sense? I kind of got the impression that you may not have read half the stuff I wrote in my last post. Or am I being that unclear in my argument? Please, when telling me why I'm wrong, could you address the arguments I actually made? It feels like a cheap shot claiming I'm some unfeeling unimaginitive being when I've never made such a claim as "imagination is useless". I've only said you can't draw objective fact from it(using many words and examples to illustrate this).

I've read all of your posts, Gayle. I haven't disregarded any piece of it. But we seem, nonetheless, to be talking past each other. It's okay with me if you can find no value in a thought experiment that doesn't index to testable hypotheses. I only wanted to point out that I wasn't under the illusion of advancing testable hypotheses when I was speaking in that mode. Hypothetical, for me, isn't a world, it's a mode of thought.

I don't have time at the moment to address every point you've made with microscopic precision - I'm due at a family gathering. Past due, in fact. But please don't take offense. If an element of my discourse doesn't reach for you because it doesn't advance truth claims in a literal way, and maybe that means not at all, then I withdraw it. No offense intended.

Okay, then i took the wrong conclusion, but it seemed a logical one to me.

Quote:

It poses them as equally vital and indispensable things. And it uses medicine as a shorthand for science of every kind, for surely medicine shows the greatest immediate practical benefits for practicing science. But the illustration was also meant to set up or clear the ground for the understanding that every form of science emerges from cultures driven and developed by the exchange of ideas. And the principal way that humans exchange ideas is through narrative.

There was a time when we had nothing like science or philosophy. Besides literal verbal exchanges to do with the immediate concerns of hearth and kin, we had only storytelling. Within that storytelling, we had oral histories of our peoples and we had mythologies--big stories about gods and heroes that were taken not only as entertainment, but as a form of instruction for the young.

There is no way to leap from that preliterate stage to the advances and benefits of modern science without passing through the age of philosophy. For in philosophy, the completely non-literal ways of codifying wisdom - that we enjoyed in oral histories, mythology and storytelling - these things give way to rational analysis. Our need for narrative doesn't cease, but it becomes augmented.

I'm not sure if that's all still in response to me because i never said that any of that was incorrect. We've been in agreeance there more or less the whole time.

Quote:

All of this sounds obvious and pedantic when I start spelling it out, but please recall that early posts from Gayle challenged the nature and value of philosophy. Everything good about it, she attributed to science, even though philosophy is the mother of sciences. She was surprised that I reported learning logic, including logic foundational to statistical reasoning, in a philosophy class. And the last time I checked, Logic is one of the four main branches of philosophy. Statistics is over in the math department, but logic is always taught in a philosophy department.

Well, logic is mathematical much the same way language is mathematical. You're just using different symbols and variables.

Also, i don't think she ever meant that philosophy is useless. She was looking for opinions and even admitted and showed her ignorance of a lot of philosophy. She asked for a viewpoint from knowledgeable people, such as yourself. I still see her more as asking about philosophy rather than trying to refute philosophy. She's trying to take what you're giving her and make sense of it. It's why she's asking and positing what she thinks are failings in your responses. I mean, we're not having a debate about which is better. We're having a discussion, probably the most interesting discussion i've been a part of on here that i can recall. I'm enjoying it a lot, anyway.

What she did say, or at least what i think she said, is that her opinion of good philosophy is grounded in science and facts.

Quote:

I hate to move recursively toward the pointless war of supremacy among academic departments, and the politics of how those things get administered, but it remains a thorn to me that even very educated people in the sciences often have no respect for the philosophy department at all, assuming it the refuge of lunatics and a museum of intellectual antiquities, and the center of pointless and uninformed debate. There's an arrogance and a disregard for intellectual history on the lips of many scientists, and I find it unappealing, unsavory and disrespectful. Also, easily dispelled among the better minds in science, when you point a few things out. Sorry if I've beat that horse past riding.

See, i'm not sure why you've brought this up. Is it because we're doing that? Maybe i haven't been clear or maybe you've been skipping my posts, but i said, or tried to say, that none of these things are better or worse than the other. That there is a place for all of them. And the best outcome in each discipline comes from communication and interdisciplinary theories. The more knowledge you use from a wider area, the better your conclusion will be.

If i was unclear or baffling, i apologise, but it's never been my position in this thread that science is better than philosophy and i've even agreed with you on most of these things you brought up in this post in previous posts.

I also kind of assumed we were past the stage in this discussion of generalising about what most scientists or most philosophers say. Yeah, i've disagreed and fought against a lot of philosophy professors and thought they were idiots because of their discounting of science, but that's not a failing of the discipline or a failing in my understanding [not necessarily, anyway, though it could have been], just like people in science departments that you've encountered have been flippant towards philosophy. Those are failings of individuals, not the systems.

First: Yeah, what Eddy said. I am not trying to demean philosophy--I'm trying to understand it. In trying to understand it, I'm pointing out things that don't make sense to me about it in the hopes of finding the argument for the other side and an understanding.

All of this sounds obvious and pedantic when I start spelling it out, but please recall that early posts from Gayle challenged the nature and value of philosophy. Everything good about it, she attributed to science, even though philosophy is the mother of sciences. She was surprised that I reported learning logic, including logic foundational to statistical reasoning, in a philosophy class. And the last time I checked, Logic is one of the four main branches of philosophy. Statistics is over in the math department, but logic is always taught in a philosophy department.
I hate to move recursively toward the pointless war of supremacy among academic departments, and the politics of how those things get administered, but it remains a thorn to me that even very educated people in the sciences often have no respect for the philosophy department at all, assuming it the refuge of lunatics and a museum of intellectual antiquities, and the center of pointless and uninformed debate. There's an arrogance and a disregard for intellectual history on the lips of many scientists, and I find it unappealing, unsavory and disrespectful. Also, easily dispelled among the better minds in science, when you point a few things out. Sorry if I've beat that horse past riding.

I’m not that much of a moron that I didn’t know logic was a branch of philosophy. My earlier question to you was simply how do you define philosophy because I sort of saw it as a mix of two things. There’s the side of it that doesn’t seem separate from science and reason(logic), but then the side of it that seems to lack objectivity--the fact that philosophers could be in disagreement seemed to indicate that philosophy lacked the objectivity of science. I know science came out of philosophy. But I kind of feel like once philosophy bore science, it had born an objective systematic way of understanding the world, hence rendering much of the more speculative questions kind of pointless(again--looking for your side of this argument because i don't know what it is)—we now had ways to go about answering them and that was through scientific methods. What I’m failing to understand is where is philosophy useful outside of objective reasoning and the scientific method? What are the parts of philosophy that do more for us than what basic reasoning and science do?

It seems to me like the point of philosophy is to understand the world around us--is this correct? This is the same goal as science. So what is in philosophy that is outside of science and basic reasoning that allows us to do that? It seems like you are saying that it can be artistic in a sense. But then I ask you, how does that differ from art?

Maybe if you are studying ethics, for example, you ask the question of what is a good life? I don’t see how you would go about answering this question without keeping touch with reality and objective reasoning(hence science). Seems you would need to define what you mean by a good life. If you are going to claim this definition is individual, that still doesn’t change the fact that you need to then study it with reason. If I say something simplistic like making lots of money is living a good life, well, ok, I’ve established a definition. Then I go from there. How do I make lots of money? But maybe the real question is establishing the definition? Does the good life mean individual happiness? Ok, look out at the observable world and see what makes people happy. Go from there. Does the good life mean treating others with respect? Ok, look at how people are going about doing that and go from there. Hmmm...maybe it is simply in defining this good life that is the role of philosophy? Is that it? Am I on to something? We need to have the definition first from philosophy and then scientific methods go about putting a good life together? I know my ignorance has got to be annoying at this point, but help me out here.

Also--it offends me when others assume scientists are unfeeling unimaginative robots who think they know the answer to everything and could never possibly comprehend anything creative or artistic. But like Eddy said--aren't we past that?

Alrighty, no hard feelings. Just really trying to nail down what it is that philosophy does.

See, i'm not sure why you've brought this up. Is it because we're doing that? Maybe i haven't been clear or maybe you've been skipping my posts, but i said, or tried to say, that none of these things are better or worse than the other. That there is a place for all of them. And the best outcome in each discipline comes from communication and interdisciplinary theories. The more knowledge you use from a wider area, the better your conclusion will be.

No, it's not because you're doing this. I've read your posts, too, and I'm aware that we're in agreement on many things. We are in a leg of the discussion that should be quite beyond inter-departmental skirmishes and you're right that the arrogance or supremacy of discipline I'm talking about is a failing of individuals, and not of the disciplines themselves.

My only point in returning or reflecting on such things was to establish the underlying currents of my thought when I first generated the apparently bad analogy or failed thought experiment. I thought that explicating those motivational currents might shed some new light or put the whole thing to rest or generate a productive new avenue for debate.

Alrighty, no hard feelings. Just really trying to nail down what it is that philosophy does.

Here's a possible answer.

Philosophy at its most basic level does what science simply can't.

Your mother dies. You feel depressed. Thanks to science you can get medical drugs that will help you cope with the aftermath, if you need it. Thanks to philosophy (love of wisdom, remember) you can find a way out of the void that your mother's death has left. With science you can control your behavior if it's erratic because of the emotional strain; with philosophy you can ask yourself the most important questions about yourself, your relation to your mother, the nature of death, the worth of life, the possibility of carrying on, the best way to carry out your mother's wishes without compromising your integrity. These are philosophical questions.

Look. Of course philosophy can't tell us how the universe began. But if we ever do know - thanks to science - philosophy will be required: Do our responsibilities change if we know the story of the universe? What would be the best way to deal with such knowledge?

Science: "Surprise, ma'am, we've cloned your late son."
Philosophy: "Will this clone really be my son, or another human being entirely? Since I didn't bring this clone into the world by carrying him in my womb, am I still his mother?"

Science: Humans share most of their DNA with apes.
Philosophy: Are "humans" and "people" synonymous? I don't share the same DNA with my best friend, but both he and I are incredibly close to the apes. How similar does my DNA structure have to be to an ape before the ape becomes a person? What is it to be a person?

The point I'm making is that philosophy should not be about answers. It is all about asking the RIGHT questions. "Why" is not always the right question. Let the scientists deal with "Why" and "How"; they have methods for that. Let the philosopher deal with the "What" and the "Who": "What is freedom, and are different notions of freedom reconcilable?" "Who am I when I am sleepwalking and I kill my cat?"

I hope this helps you see why philosophy is useful. There are various branches of philosophy of interest only to specialists, but in general the consequences of philosophy are enormous. If one day we discover through scientific pursuit that men ARE in general more intelligent than women, that's dangerous enough. But to define intelligence they'll need to be philosophical about it; and they'll need philosophical aptitude when announcing the discovery to the world.

Thanks. The picture’s becoming a little more clear to me. There still seems to be quite a bit of overlap with science though. Philosophy asks why/science asks why. Philosophy tries to find answers using reason and logic/science does as well along with observation and experiment(two things which philosophy should not ignore). But I see what you are saying about it trying to pin down definitions and decide what to do about the knowledge we have. It feels very much in the same category of rational thought as science, though, which is why I stated before that all the “good” things about philosophy have always felt like science to me. Rational thought and logical reasoning feels like science to me. But your examples are making the distinction(while still kind of fuzzy) a little more clear.

Here’s some more questions:

Back to the Sailer article that started this whole thing. Sailer’s argument seems to be that, to be relevant, philosophy should strive to be consistent with reality. It should not draw and hold fast to conclusions which are inconsistent with the world in front of us. It also does no good to waste it’s time on irrelevant questions(like quibbling over a word choice when the intent of the word is understood in the context it is used in—as in the example about the selfish gene.) This seems to make perfect sense to me. Do the philosophers here agree or disagree with this?

The secondary issue(or maybe primary issue) here, of course, is whether or not Sailer’s picture of the philosophy world as one that consistently ignores reality and leans on absurd or trite conclusions as it’s only product is an accurate picture. Maybe this is my uneducated bias, but I feel like I’ve seen this a lot-- absurd and/or trite conclusions. These type of examples probably stick out more than others do to thier nature, but it is these type of examples that lead to the noted bias and sterotyping from the scientific community. The article VP linked to as a counter to the Sailer article didn’t do it for me. I got nothing from that other than, yes, we cannot experience what it is like to be a bat because we are not bats—I failed to see the point(my more detailed counter arguments are in previous posts). But I fully accept that I may have missed something there.

Sailer poses examples of philosophy done wrong, what are some examples of philosophy done right? Could people give some examples along with an explanation of how they are relevant? I will try to look for examples myself as well--Sailer himself mentioned Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and David Hume as reasonable fellers.

My earlier question to you was simply how do you define philosophy because I sort of saw it as a mix of two things. There’s the side of it that doesn’t seem separate from science and reason(logic), but then the side of it that seems to lack objectivity--the fact that philosophers could be in disagreement seemed to indicate that philosophy lacked the objectivity of science. I know science came out of philosophy. But I kind of feel like once philosophy bore science, it had born an objective systematic way of understanding the world, hence rendering much of the more speculative questions kind of pointless(again--looking for your side of this argument because i don't know what it is)—we now had ways to go about answering them and that was through scientific methods. What I’m failing to understand is where is philosophy useful outside of objective reasoning and the scientific method? What are the parts of philosophy that do more for us than what basic reasoning and science do?

It seems to me like the point of philosophy is to understand the world around us--is this correct? This is the same goal as science. So what is in philosophy that is outside of science and basic reasoning that allows us to do that?

Phil has already done a nice job of addressing this, but I'll beg your indulgence and continue, as promised. Maybe I can add at least a little something. To revisit a point that he made, even much earlier on the thread, the purpose of philosophy is less to provide the right answers and more to ask the right questions. And there is no final word on the best questions and the proper way to frame them. It's an ongoing cultural enterprise, related to science but also quite different.

Philosophy is less obliged to prove its worth in terms of simple utility, and more obliged to examine the nature of utility and to question what it is that people find useful, and why.

Philosophy is less obliged to adhere to rigorous standards of objectivity, and more obliged to question our very notions of objectivity and to examine to what degree and in what sense objectivity is even possible for us.

Philosophy is less about adhering to a strict set of procedural rules in the acquisition of knowledge and more about examining, defining, and questioning any set of procedural rules that come to be used in practice. When a scientist questions basic premises, she is doing philosophy.

In one sense, it's quite accurate to view both philosophy and science has sharing the same goal of providing a better understanding of the world around us. But that achievement of understanding is not a linear equation. And we're also after a better understanding of the world within and between us.

Philosophy tries to find answers using reason and logic/science does as well along with observation and experiment(two things which philosophy should not ignore).

Rationalists try to find answers (or at least better questions) primarily through the use of Reason, amenability to known laws, and internal consistency. Classically, Rationalists believe that we have innate ideas that all of our acquired knowledge is dependent upon and organized around

Empiricists, on the other hand, emphasize observation and experiment. Classically, in departing from Rationalism, Empiricists dispute the doctrine of innate ideas and assert that we are born 'Tabula rasa' - a blank slate. Empiricism arose when society lacked the concept of a scientist. Early Empiricists insisting on observation and experiment, and applying their nascent faith in these tools to the world around them, were known as natural philosophers. Not in the sense of born with undeniable talent, like a 'natural' in baseball, but in the strict sense of a philosopher preoccupied with observation and discovery in the natural world. The earliest biologists, for example, were natural philosophers. By Victorian times, they were known simply as naturalists.

And despite the apparent ascendancy of Empiricism over Rationalism, very modern and well-researched scientific theories have reasserted the place of 'innate ideas' in one sense or another. For example, cognitive psychologists and linguists enjoy a high degree of certainty, based on extensive studies, that humans possess a language acquisition mechanism. It's not likely a little black box hiding under the occipital lobe. It may be dependent upon multiple brain areas - but it's also dependent upon a discrete window of developmental opportunity. We aren't born knowing a language, of course, so it isn't a perfect analogy to liken this to the doctrine of innate ideas; however, we are born with a discrete capacity for the acquisition of language. We are born with a built-in capacity for grammar, the deep rules of how the sounds of language combine. And our capacity for realizing that innate potential needs to be activated in time.

We know from extreme cases of feral children raised by wolves or locked in a shed and denied human contact, that language acquisition becomes painfully difficult if not impossible after the developmental opportunity is lost. This is also why, despite a remarkable degree of brain plasticity, most people find the acquisition of a second language to be challenging, especially later in life.

Maybe we didn't come into the world already knowing things, but we came in knowing how to know, prewired, if you will, for what is inside of us to actualize itself and flourish just so long as the environment provides the requisite degree and variety of appropriate kinds of stimulation.

This kind of modern scientific understanding suggests that early Rationalist philosophers were not entirely off-base in positing some storehouse of innate ideas that help to make us human. They simply lacked a complete understanding of what rational and intuitive processes so strongly suggested to them. Science, as we know it, emerged largely from the movement in philosophy toward empiricism, but it can easily circle back toward the insights of early Rationalists and find in those insights a new appreciation.

And of course we had some phiilosphers fairly early to say, "Both! I'm a Rationalist-Empiricist. I do not believe wholly in the Doctrine of Innate Ideas, but I likewise do not believe that we are bornTabula rasa." And those philosophers could have enjoined you to lengthy and profound explanations that made lots of good sense and as pleasant in discovery to listen to them as Sherlock Holmes explaining a murder investigation--despite being generated apart from many of the tools we associate with modern science.

* * *

One problem with asking, "What does philosophy offer us apart from scientific logic and common sense?" is that, past the notion of looking both ways before you cross the street, good sense is not all that common and is not a given. And where people have it, it has come down to them through a long process of cultural acquisition and assimilation. The "given" feeling of common sense notions is an illusion created through long acquaintance. When philosophy carries the sound of common sense exercised with profound and unusual precision, it's doing something right. And when philosophy carries the sound of idle speculation, it may be venturing into territory that we'll laugh at as non-existant in future centuries, or it may be divining real things that we've yet to understand. Or it may be expressing a non-literal truth through analogy and metaphor. One century's idle speculation can become the next century's common sense.

Another problem with the question is that scientific method is a philosophical method. It is the purview of science to adopt a single philsophical method known for satisfying and repeatable empirical results, and to run with that method, generating results and learning from those results. It is the purview of philosophy to go on examining and comparing methods.

There was a time when all reputable scientists agreed that Newtonian physics provided the best and only realistic model for how the physical world works, right down to the atomic level. There was no need to go deeper. As Newtonian principles afforded remarkably accurate predictions, there was little need to go on questioning it. But people did. And one or two, like Einstein, with startling results. Speculative theories that turn out to be true owe something to philosophy, for the very act of thinking in a way that is both speculative-intuitive and rigourously systematic is the practice of philosophy--even if the thinker isn't primarily known as a 'philosopher.'

There was a movement in philosophy much more recent and modern than the classical debates between Rationalists and Empiricists that attempted to constrain what philosophers can legitimately talk about in professional papers and public debate. Proponents of this movement insisted that philosophy dress itself like science and stick only to observable and measurable phenomena. The whole feeling of this movement was that modern philosophy should be vastly more scientific. They even asserted the doctrine that a proposition is "cognitively meaningful" only if there is a finite procedure for conclusively determining whether it is true or false. This movement despised Metaphysics and anything speculative and it was the dominant voice in philosophy of science up through the 1950's. It's called logical positivism.

While highly attractive to the scientifically minded, positivism does not have the last word on the way philosophy is to be practiced. It contains contradictions: for example, standards of evidence for truth claims that positivism's core tenets themselves cannot withstand. And too many worthy things that must simply remain unexamined. That it was the one 'right' way to do philosophy--or at least, the only right way to do philosophy of science--was an item of faith for the Vienna Circle and other proponents. And they fell apart. Despite the objectivity they were striving for, they had internal disagreements and political strife. At least one major player and genius, Ludwig Wittgenstein, later despised his early positivist-slanted work.

Maybe if you are studying ethics, for example, you ask the question of what is a good life? I don’t see how you would go about answering this question without keeping touch with reality and objective reasoning(hence science). Seems you would need to define what you mean by a good life. If you are going to claim this definition is individual, that still doesn’t change the fact that you need to then study it with reason. If I say something simplistic like making lots of money is living a good life, well, ok, I’ve established a definition. Then I go from there. How do I make lots of money? But maybe the real question is establishing the definition? Does the good life mean individual happiness? Ok, look out at the observable world and see what makes people happy. Go from there. Does the good life mean treating others with respect? Ok, look at how people are going about doing that and go from there. Hmmm...maybe it is simply in defining this good life that is the role of philosophy? Is that it? Am I on to something? We need to have the definition first from philosophy and then scientific methods go about putting a good life together? I know my ignorance has got to be annoying at this point, but help me out here.

Yes, you're onto something. The trick is in establishing the definition. Once you're clear on the definition, and assuming you can identify the phenomena of happiness when you encounter it, one approach would be to go out into the world and try to measure happiness. Maybe, with enough data gathering and statistical analysis, you could determine how much factors like wealth play a part in human happiness. Maybe you would find that it's vitally important. Or maybe you would find that as long as people aren't starving, they find other ways to make themselves happy.

I have a friend who visited Cuba and described the people she encountered there--especially the children--as radiantly happy, despite having very little. It would take a long time to separate the merely anecdotal from more substantial observations, but it does seem that other factors besides wealth are at play.

There are psychologists, for example, who now specialize in nothing but the study of human happiness. I'm sure they have lots of good things to share.

A philosopher--being half literature professor and indebted to the past--might start by examining classical sources. People have written on the nature of human happiness for centuries.

For the Greek, Epicurus, happiness consists in the rational pursuit of pleasure. Pleasures that lead to dissipation and regret, like excessive cups of wine or mead, would violate the terms of Reason for practicing moderation. Modest imbibing and a great time spent with friends would not. For Epicurus, friendship was the source of the good life. He did not believe that wealth alone could make any man happy. And he did not believe in gods or supernatural forces that could shape human happiness. He believed in friendship as a source of happiness with no serious downside. And he lived communally with his closest friends and lovers, who also tended to be his students. When he wasn't sharing a great meal and preaching rational hedonism as the key to a good life, he liked to do simple things like read or work in his garden. And sex, I'm pretty sure, fit into that picture, as well. Although he did caution that sexual relationships could often lead to misery.

A philosopher wouldn't consider it a trifle or a distraction to spend countless hours reading classical sources on the nature of happiness, even though no two of the early philosophers agree precisely, and even though there is no shred of scientific objectivity in early approaches to the problem.

Important Disclaimer: Although this is Chuck Palahniuk’s official website, we are in essence, more an official ‘fansite.’ Chuck Palahniuk himself does not own nor run this website. Nor did he create it. It was started by Dennis Widmyer, who is the webmaster and editor of most of the content. Chuck Palahniuk himself should not be held accountable nor liable for any of the content posted on this website. The opinions expressed in the news updates, content pages and message boards are not the opinions of Chuck Palahniuk nor his publishers. If you are trying to contact Chuck Palahniuk, sending emails to this website will not get you there. You should instead, take the more professional route of contacting his publicist at Doubleday.